EXPAND will develop a toolbox for implementing ‘Challenge Based Idea Accelerators’ and run a first Idea Accelerator focused on homelessness.The toolbox is aimed at higher education teaching staff and will enable a practical new method responding to the need for more civic engagement, developing new problem solving skills and stimulate social entrepreneurship in students. The proposed project builds on the creativity of students combined with design thinking and challenge-based education to tackle societal challenges, with a focus on homelessness in the pilot programme. We call out for students, innovators, creative thinkers, tech people and the higher education world, in particular, to join forces and bring heavyweight social challenges in the spotlight. Our project aims to forge unlikely alliances across a wide spectrum of partners to define a viable, replicable and scalable methodology for tackling systemic societal problems.In this project, we will design a 4 month idea-accelerator with a strong focus on the needs analysis of the challenge in question resulting in a public demo day.The alliance will consist of business school teaching staff, design thinking experts, social enterprise leaders with expertise on how to tackle the issue and startup professionals. These different actors will work together in order to finetune the methods to the specific environment and challenge, in this case homelessness.