Birkbeck: Pioneer awards – winners crowned

Birkbeck University’s Pioneer Programme rounded off a year of innovative entrepreneurial growth with a fantastic virtual Awards & Celebration Evening last week. Six fantastic student finalists pitched their business ideas and faced Q&A from a judging panel of expert entrepreneurs and start-up professionals. Hetty Bonney-Mercer with FemInStyle Africa was awarded ‘Best Business Idea’ and Alexander Flint-Mitchell with Blind Cupid was awarded Best Business Pitch (see above). After her win was announced, Hetty thanked the judges and commented that Pioneer had given FemInStyle Africa “the opportunity to showcase what we are doing”. Pioneer will be expanding in Autumn, building on the success of the early-stage enterprise programme by adding a new growth-focused short course for later stage businesses. Click here for the full story.

 

Aston: BSEEN transformed and end of year celebration

BSEEN the Birmingham based student & graduate start up support programme, transformed its 5-day face-to–face intensive startup boot camp to an online version, via Blackboard Collaborate, with 90 minute interactive webinars held over a three week period. A total of 55 start-ups went through the two boot camps taking place in May and June. Find out more here. Aston also held an online end of year celebration of its Enterprise activity, in particular the Santander Universities funded Enterprise bursaries. Beneficiaries of the bursary which ranged from £500 to £3000 included Joseph Poxon founder of male grooming products Rugged Nature and Chuks Ononye founder of the meal prep business Chefiesta. This video was produced by BSEEN start-up Narce Media for the event.

 

UCL: Start up receives funding to accelerate social care training

Digital health startup Oslr plans to help train social care workers in preventing the spread of coronavirus after securing a £50,000 government grant from Innovate UK. UCL based Oslr is currently repurposing its digital health platform in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. Initially developed to help train hospital doctors, the technology will be adapted for use by staff in care homes and social care workers in the community, so they can be trained more efficiently to prevent contagion in these settings. Read the full story here.

 

Bristol: Launch of the Student Showcase 2020

The University of Bristol’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship was established four years ago and has come a long way since then. It delivers authentic learning, where students engage real clients and deliver innovation projects in multi-disciplinary teams. As the first integrated masters students graduate, the Centre has launched a Student Showcase website to demonstrate how they have developed innovative solutions to real-world challenges. Students are now taking their experience to industry or launching the projects as real start-up businesses.