Internship at Priva

Internship at Priva, De Lier, Westland

You will design a business model and roadmap for transforming the current supply chain in horticulture flowers to a `reversed chain’. This topic is with Priva, a high-tech company in the climate control field, specializing in smart building automation, greenhouse technology & indoor farming and with De Bloemistenkwekerij, a breeder in high tech cut flowers.
The current production and trade of cut flowers is a `pipeline’ model: a one way street in revenue and data. A grower harvests the flowers, brings them to a flower auction. A trader buys them, changes sometimes packaging and makes mixes in order to sell them to the retail stores.  Reversing the chain means: growing on site, packing on site, all in answer to demand from local flower shops. Due to the reversal, breeders collect more data about customer preferences. The data can be used for optimization of growth, size and assortment of the cut flowers, but possibly also improve sustainability by reducing waste and energy consumption. Customer data and trends flow would upstream to the production facility, making it possible to adapt the assortment and optimizing on logistics and options for scaling up in larger greenhouse facilities. New varieties can easier be linked to customer demand and behaviour. Breeders would own the whole chain instead of being just a part of a value chain, gaining insight and control to optimize production and minimizing inputs, leaving more revenue at the grower.
However, realizing this vision implies a major transformation of the current business logic in the industry as well as careful designing the facilitating data platform, platform ecosystem and related value propositions.

Your research questions may include but not be limited to:

• Designing and evaluating a data-driven business model for a `reversed’ supply chain in horticulture flowers
• Creating a roadmap to launch, scale-up and international the data-driven business model
• Designing a data platform or platform ecosystem that facilitates the reserved supply chain
• Designing value propositions or use cases of the reversed / shortened supply chain, which go beyond the value propositions stated above
• Modelling the short ‘value’ chain compared to the current way of working

A successful student may become the (co-)entrepreneur of the business / start-up as spin-off of the thesis.

For more information about Priva look at this video on YouTube. 

If you are interested in this internship vacancy you can contact Jan Westra via jan.westra@priva.com.