Since 2006, the Netherlands has been actively engaged in a process of developing, piloting, and institutionalizing a new 2-year, short-cycle higher education degree, titled the "associate degree". This initiative evolved as a collaborative grassroots effort spearheaded by several Dutch national higher education and business organizations and supported by the Dutch Ministry of Education. The successful implementation of the associate degree in the Netherlands offers an example of a bottom-up policy approach carried out by the coordinated efforts of an array of interest groups, both national and international. These groups formed a specific policy community that was active around the issue of the new short-cycle degree. This chapter aims to demonstrate that the bottom-up activities and coordination of the different interest groups were instrumental to subsequent changes in the Higher Education Act and the introduction of the new degree. The author will trace the formulation and implementation of the new degree in the higher education landscape in the Netherlands, analyzing the role of these interest groups in policy development. This analysis is based on reports prepared by different members in this policy community, the 2008 and 2009 University of Amsterdam's interim pilot reports for the associate degree, surveys conducted with business representatives, reports by the LEIDO (the National Innovation and Expertise Center for Lifelong Learning), and materials published by the Dutch Association for Small and Medium Enterprises on professional higher education and the short-cycle degrees. (Contains 1 figure and 7 notes.)