Entrepreneurship Institute King’s College London
IMPACT 2019 2020 Entrepreneurship Institute King’s College London
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IMPACT 2019 2020
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Director’s Welcome About the Entrepreneurship Institute What makes us unique? Community 5 Diversity & Inclusion Sustainability Entrepreneurial Skills 7 Venture Crawl Enterprise Award Skill Up Look Sharp Entrepreneurial Summer Internships Developing Ideas 11 Idea Factory Women Entrepreneurs Programme Starting and Scaling Ventures
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King’s20 Accelerator London Demo Day Digital Demo Day Venture Case Studies Start-Up Visas The Neuroscience of Entrepreneurship
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What did we learn this year?
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Director’s Welcome There has never been a more important time to become entrepreneurial. This past year has seen our focus shift from entrepreneurs to being entrepreneurial and developing entrepreneurial skills. These are skills that boost employability and further career ambitions for everyone, and are vital for every society, industry and economy. Our Seven Skills of an Entrepreneurial Mindset is now the framework we use to develop, monitor, test and evaluate impact, including within our King’s20 Accelerator. We’ve seen huge successes this year, from our collaborations, events and engagements, to our ever-expanding remit teaching entrepreneurial skills, beyond and within the curriculum (bring on Disruptive Dentistry!), and within our King’s20 Accelerator.
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The global pandemic has seen us pivot rapidly to digital delivery. To the credit of our staff, whose flexibility, agility and resilience I applaud, we saw an increase in engagement, participation, and further demand for our work, so much so that we expanded our offering over the summer. A highlight for me this year was seeing the Women Entrepreneurs Programme, a partnership with Santander, flourish in its second year. We set out to become the first university accelerator to achieve gender parity amongst our founders, by identifying and removing barriers and building self-sustaining, communities and support mechanisms to deliver a pipeline of women-led ventures for our King’s20 cohort. This year we succeeded, and our
goal is to establish and embed a sustainable model so that we can continue this year on year. We too are on an entrepreneurial journey. Beginning with a team of two, we now have a flourishing community of over
31,300 students, staff and alumni. The Seven Skills of
an Entrepreneurial Mindset has helped us refocus our priorities on developing entrepreneurial people and skills. Looking ahead, we want to show the whole King’s community the world of opportunities that come when you realise an entrepreneurial version of yourself. We hope you enjoy reading our 19/20 Impact Report.
Julie Devonshire OBE
About the Entrepreneurship Institute
The Entrepreneurship Institute is the dedicated entrepreneurship hub within King’s College London. We work collaboratively with faculties, student societies and external partners. Our vision, in line with King’s Vision 2029, is for everyone within the King’s community to recognise the benefits of an entrepreneurial mindset, develop entrepreneurial skills, and ultimately realise an entrepreneurial version of themselves. An entrepreneurial mindset, which is based on tangible and transferable skills, will boost your employability and further your ambitions in any career, whether you want to grow a business or work in organisations helping to solve the world’s biggest challenges. Our mission is to work with students, staff and alumni to nurture entrepreneurial curiosity, to develop entrepreneurial skills and aspirations for creative problem solving, to help devise and progress disruptive ideas, as well as to start and scale ventures. At the Entrepreneurship Institute, we are investing in people and skills. We know that by teaching people to think entrepreneurially, we will be contributing to a society of pioneering leaders, creative problem solvers, and innovative thinkers who are not only equipped to tackle the most pressing challenges of today, but also those ahead.
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What makes us unique? The Seven Skills of an Entrepreneurial Mindset
We believe anyone can develop an entrepreneurial mindset which is made up of tangible skills that anyone can practice and hone. We have developed a robust skills framework that we use to teach our community how to find innovative solutions, how to test their ideas and iterate quickly, how to be resilient, build strong and diverse teams and how to compel others, and of course, how to Get it Done.
framework to develop, monitor, test and evaluate progress across everything the Institute does, from engagement campaigns to idea feedback sessions, from the King’s20 Accelerator to our own team’s ways of working.
Breaking down Barriers
Recognising the barriers that some people face in engaging with our programmes is crucial and we have invested in a longterm programme to research and identify the barriers to participation and success. Our Women Entrepreneurs Programme is open to all femaleidentifying and non-binary students, staff and alumni and aims to deliver self-sustaining gender parity within our King’s20 Accelerator.
The King’s20 Accelerator
Our Skills-First Approach
Everyone can be entrepreneurial – not just entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurial skills boost employability, further career ambitions; every industry needs entrepreneurial leaders and thinkers. Our skills-first approach means that we use the Seven Skills of an Entrepreneurial Mindset as a
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Our flagship start-up support programme, the King’s20 Accelerator, is home to the 20 brightest and highest potential ventures from King’s. We’ve pioneered an experts-inresidence model to provide tailored and specialist support to our ventures. We’re also passionate about ensuring transparency and therefore the IP of all our start-ups is 100% owned by the entrepreneurs.
Collaboration makes it happen While universities are
highly competitive, they are also deeply collaborative. We are proud of the many partnerships and collaborations we have fostered within the London and international entrepreneurial ecosystem, from Venture Crawl (now an international event which spans four continents) to the inaugural London Demo Day event. Our collaborations deliver synergy, bringing supporters and impact to our joint communities that otherwise would not have appeared.
EI TIMELINE
Service, Sustainability and SDGs We are here to
deliver on King’s Vision 2029 and fulfil a commitment to society and the environment. We have integrated service, sustainability and the UN Sustainable Development Goals into all our programmes, and our ways of working. This year we were awarded a Bronze Award in the NUS Green Impact Awards and worked to include sustainability as a module for both our Idea Factory and King’s20 accelerator programme. Going forward, we are looking at including questions around the Sustainable Development Goals within the King’s20 application to ensure that it is a considered part of our ventures’ aspirations.
2014
Entrepreneurship Institute founded
2015
Julie Devonshire OBE appointed as Director
2016
King’s20 accelerator launches Enterprise Award launches Idea Factory launches
2017
Venture Crawl launches
2018
Awarded Times Higher Education Most Entrepreneurial University Venture Crawl expands to 13 London universities
2019
Women Entrepreneurs Programme launches with support from Santander Universities
Community as strategy
We know that feelings of belonging to a community have direct correlations with university retention and success, which is why community development across the Entrepreneurship Institute, and the fostering of micro-communities within our programmes is one of our strategic priorities. We also know that creating communities facilitates impactful peer-to-peer support within them.
Entrepreneurial Brain Challenge research project launches London Demo Day 2019 – a collaboration between UCL, Imperial College and King’s Seven Skills of an Entrepreneurial Mindset launched 2020
Venture Crawl goes international with events in London, Hong Kong, Chicago and Melbourne Celebration of our 5th birthday First-ever Digital Demo Day Awarded Bronze NUS Green Impact award
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Community We kicked off the year with a team of ambassadors at Welcome Week which saw 2500 people joining our community. Our workshops, which encouraged new students to think entrepreneurially, were a hit, attracting some of the highest engagement of all the Welcome events. Every year we support societies and student groups to deliver their own initiatives through our Entrepreneurial Activity Fund. Societies ran talks, visits, competitions, boot camps, conferences and hackathons, that encouraged people to have entrepreneurial experiences, develop self-efficacy and become more aware of their entrepreneurial skills. Even in the face of a pandemic, we continued to hold exciting events with high-profile and interesting speakers. This year, the sense of belonging, togetherness and support in our community has been phenomenal. From skilling up workshops to supporting those affected by cancelled internships, to members of our community getting out there and delivering meals for NHS staff and food banks. Although the second half of this year has been a challenging one, it gave way for our community to showcase how they embody King’s values and entrepreneurial mindsets.
4000+ 16000+ Attendees at our events both in person and online.
Followers across our social media platforms
18% 2601 Increase in our community, from 26 511 to 31 345.
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Student sign-ups to our mailing list this year.
Diversity & Inclusion Diversity is a key driver of innovation. A diversity of experiences, backgrounds, characteristics, lifestyles, perspectives and talents underpin the development of new and disruptive ideas that drive change and progress. While the work that has gone into our Women Entrepreneurs
Programmes has seen a positive impact, having achieved gender-parity on our King’s20 Accelerator, we know that there is more work to be done. However, without the data to inform interventions aimed at addressing inequality, it’s important to know where to start.
As a result, starting from next year, we will be standardising Equality data monitoring across all our programmes and events so that we have a clearer idea of who is in our community, and what the barriers to participation and success are.
Sustainability King’s declared a Climate Emergency in 2019 and we responded by exploring how we can embed Sustainability across our work. Three priorities emerged: • To reduce our Carbon Footprint, • To make Sustainability visible in our 7 Skills of an Entrepreneurial Mindset framework and • To embed ‘teaching’ on Sustainability into our main initiatives, such as King’s20
To launch this work, we successfully achieved the Bronze sustainability accreditation from NUS Green Impact for the first time and ran events on the Circular Economy in King’s Sustainability Week. Our future plans centre around bringing together champions (we call them ‘Sustainability Samurais’) from within the Entrepreneurship Institute community and beyond to accelerate this work.
What we will continue:
What we will start focusing on:
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Entrepreneurial Skills
2019-2020 saw the launch of The Seven Skills of an Entrepreneurial Mindset skills framework. We can now properly define what we mean by “entrepreneurial mindset” in a way which helps our community to better understand, benchmark and articulate their own skill development. It also enables us to say with confidence that every single one of our programmes helps staff, students and alumni to develop one or more of these key skills. Lastly and most importantly we can now evidence that opportunities really do provide a tangible jump in our community’s entrepreneurial skills and by extension their chances of future success in whatever career path they choose. Venture Crawl 2020 was a highlight of the year, not only because it was one of the last events we were able to hold in person before switching to digital delivery as a consequence of Covid-19, but our partners from London’s entrepreneurship ecosystem this year were exceptional. We also discovered through launching Skill Up, Look Sharp that there is a great appetite within our community, especially among students, to further their skill development over the summer. We saw huge uptake in this opportunity and a great number of people have subsequently moved on to the Enterprise Award and are therefore further investing in developing their entrepreneurial skills.
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I’ve actually attended two Venture Crawls due to how much I enjoyed the first. The main thing that has remained consistent has been the variety of experts from not just different sectors, but also different positions within entrepreneurship that opened their doors to us. The bus rides with its networking opportunities, an array of ideas, as well as the anticipatory pitch competition kept us all engaged the entire time. Juhi Waeerkar
Venture Crawl Set up by the Entrepreneurship Institute in 2017 with one bus, London Venture Crawl has since grown into an international annual event.
ecosystem first-hand and meet top entrepreneurial leaders. Participants take part in behind-the-scenes tours, talks and activities.
The journey takes students to some of London’s top innovation hubs and workspaces to experience London’s start-up
The event is designed to give students the opportunity to connect to real-world businesses, be inspired by
18 London universities participated in 2019
the UK’s vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem, and gain skills in selfconfidence, creativethinking and leadership. VIP passengers hop on board the buses to share their stories and stimulate conversations, peer-to-peer learning and idea sharing.
400 100% Total students participated in 2019
Would recommend the experience to a friend
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I really enjoyed participating in the Enterprise Award! It gave me a better understanding of what the 7 skills were, how to develop them, and network with likeminded individuals. Most importantly it gave me the opportunity to actively reflect on my own skills and see concrete ways to improve them. Stefanie Mulder
Enterprise Award Enterprise Award is a year-long, co-curricular programme which is designed to take students through the Seven Skills of an Entrepreneurial Mindset to enhance their employability and career ambitions. The programme encourages participants to take the opportunity to explore and discover the world of entrepreneurship and the London start-up ecosystem by attending events and workshops.
We also strongly believe in fostering community and promoting opportunities for participants to buddy up and work in groups. The award contributes to each student’s Higher Education Achievement Report, which can be showcased to employers.
94 90% 83% Students achieved the Enterprise Award in 2019/20, almost doubling the award rate of the previous year.
Skill Up Look Sharp Skill Up Look Sharp was a rapidly developed response for the many King’s students who had their summer internships cancelled due to the global pandemic.
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Reported that the award gave them a better understanding of entrepreneurial skills.
The seven-week email course was promoted through our communities, faculties, the Careers & Employability department as well to Summer School students and King’s offer-holders, to ensure that as many students as possible were supported in upskilling their CVs at a time when jobs and internships were scarce.
Reported that the award helped them develop entrepreneurial skills.
384 Students signed up for Skill Up Look Sharp.
Entrepreneurial Summer Internships Each year, through a partnership with Santander and the King’s Business School, we offer current students the opportunity to intern over the Summer with some of our ventures on the King’s20 Accelerator. The internships provide students with first-hand experience working in a start-up environment, skills in resilience, team building and thinking lean, as well as practical knowledge
in business planning, sales and digital marketing, and product development. This year, we received 105 applications, from which we selected 11 interns, providing 1320 hours of skills and employability development. After the summer internships 80% of the interns felt ready to enter the professional environment and described the programme as “inspiring and unique”.
It feels rewarding to see how your small idea can turn into a successful business that brings value to so many people around you. Working with such hard-working, determined, and intelligent entrepreneurs has been very inspirational and it has pushed me to be more daring and relentless in my own endeavours.
105
Applications to our internship programme
Anna Nguyen
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Developing Ideas It has been a great year for seeing some amazing new ideas come through our community. Helping those who have had a bright spark of inspiration but need a guiding hand is one of the most important services the Entrepreneurship Institute provides. This year we have focused on ensuring that we’re providing the best support and guidance possible. Rather than focusing on quantity of ideas we wanted to prove that those that did come to us were able to make tangible progress with their business ideas and give those individuals the skills required to go further. This shift meant that we saw a decline in the number of Idea Factory application for this academic year, however we were able to take more teams further in the competition, and provide more support to more teams. It paid off. This year we saw the highest ever conversion of teams entering Idea Factory going on to win places on the King’s20 Accelerator. This year has been an investment in the future of our start up pipeline and we’re excited to see what next year has in store!
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It was one of the best things I’ve done. To be surrounded by like-minded people and getting to work and develop something you’re passionate about and then share it with others was just fantastic. Josephine Philips
Idea Factory Idea Factory is King’s College London’s flagship idea generation competition. The competition empowers budding entrepreneurs within the King’s community by showcasing their new ideas, which have the potential to grow into worthy and successful businesses. Participating in Idea Factory is a great way to win support to help make an idea a reality. Participants take part in supporting workshops to give them the skills to generate and pitch ideas with clarity and enthusiasm.
73 Applications received for Idea Factory 2020
In 2020, ten short-listed finalists pitched to a panel of expert judges battling to win a share of a £6,000 prize pot and support package to help make their idea a reality. The winners were announced at a reception hosted by Baroness Deborah Bull, Vice President & Vice-Principal (London), in the River Room of the House of Lords in front of an audience of entrepreneurs and investors. The winners were recognised for their disruptive and innovative thinking.
2020 Idea Factory winners: Malebox - the first
comprehensive at home male fertility testing service, offering personalised recommendations to improve and track fertility levels.
Eczamine - a support app for
patients with eczema which uses AI models to track and predict a patient’s condition and their next flare-up.
Sojo - A Deliveroo-style
service for clothing alterations, repairs and upcycling.
80% 100% Reported that the programme helped them take their idea forward
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Women Entrepreneurs Programme The Women Entrepreneurs programme aims to achieve gender parity across the Entrepreneurship Institute’s activities, with a key aim to build gender-parity, sustainably, into the King’s20 Accelerator. The programme is open to all female-identifying and nonbinary students, staff and alumni at King’s and increases your exposure to entrepreneurial skills, knowledge sharing and community building. There are currently over 500 members of the Women Entrepreneurs community. Throughout the year, we run 2727 hours of events, workshops and classes including,
workshops, pitching sessions, mentoring, coding classes networking events, social activities, and an annual two-day retreat. We are creating a community of women with an entrepreneurial spirit, who are empowered to support each other’s ideas and ventures and who share learning and experiences. The Women Entrepreneurs Programme is a three-year programme supported by Santander Universities.
77% Indicated they felt supported and ready to apply to the King’s20 Accelerator, following the Retreat.
38
Members of the WEP community applied to the King’s20 Accelerator
17 Progressed to the interview stage
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It’s a really nice way to connect with other female entrepreneurs and to build that supportive network of other women entrepreneurs who are doing similar things that actually get what you’re doing. WEP was really useful in helping me get my pitch ready and getting the confidence I needed to pitch Banana Scoops to the world. Jess Salamanca, Banana Scoops
One of the biggest things I got out of the Women Entrepreneurs Programme was the community with other female entrepreneurs who are experiencing similar challenges. The Programme gives you momentum - when we look at our entrepreneurial journey in years to come, this will feel like a real turning point. Adele Aitchison, Grandnanny
I’ve been to several different workshops with the Women Entrepreneurs Programme. It’s SO inspiring to be in that room with all of them... It’s a really healthy place to be and it’s really helped me, emotionally and actually in terms of my business as well. Josephine Philips, Sojo
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Starting and Scaling Ventures At the Entrepreneurship Institute, we preach the virtues of skills such as thinking lean, resilience, team building and getting it done; all skills that we ourselves employed in pivoting our support for start-ups to digital in the face of a global pandemic. We rapidly migrated our King’s20 Accelerator to digital provision, offering online bootcamps, workshops, peer crit sessions and collectively holding 360 hours of mentoring with industry experts. This year, we were incredibly grateful to our Entrepreneurin-Residence, David Walsh, for his annual scholarship award. The David Walsh Awards have always been directed to recognising leadership and teamwork skills and development, and arguably there has never been a more
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telling time for our ventures to show these qualities, and to demonstrate their composure and resilience. While we enjoyed a tremendously successful London Demo Day with our Partners Imperial College and UCL in Septemebr, our iconic King’s20 Demo Day, usually attended by 400+ investors and visitors, evolved into a dedicated online platform featuring pre-recorded pitches and company insights. We are incredibly proud of the ability of our ventures to display such agility and resilience in the face of uncertainty and the ever-changing circumstances. Additionally, David generously provided a ‘Hardship grant’ for ventures who experienced financial hardship in light of the pandemic.
The King’s20 Accelerator saw a phenomenal 200 applications for our Cohort V, soundly demonstrating the passionate problem-solvers amongst the King’s ecosystem. We held 42 virtual interviews as an opportunity to ‘meet’ and discuss their business proposition before selecting the 20 highest potential ventures to join us for the forthcoming King’s20 Accelerator (commencing in September 2020). Incoming ventures were requested to reflect upon their individual skill set in alignment with the Seven Skills of an Entrepreneurial Mindset and encouraged to share how their ventures approach sustainability from the off in alignment with the Entrepreneurship Institute’s priorities. During the 19-20 academic year we also endorsed 10 individuals under the Start-Up Visa route, which included incredibly diverse ideas, covering sector from the arts to med tech.
Joining the King’s20 Accelerator was the best beginning for Muslimah. It motivated us to focus on the single thing that mattered -building something that our users love and finding product market fit. Being a student and working on a start-up is challenging but the support and invaluable guidance at Kings’20 allowed me to do both. Aysha Ingar, Muslimah App
King’s20 Accelerator King’s20 Accelerator is a flagship programme supporting the 20 brightest and highest potential ventures from King’s to reach their potential. Ventures can be at any stage of their development and the accelerator is open to all King’s students, staff and alumni. During their year with us, they receive an estimated £60,000 worth of in-kind support which includes access to a co-working
space in our beautiful, Central London co-working space, weekly coaching from eight Experts-in-Residence, access to a network of investors and partners, access to funded interns, access to grant funding opportunities, a package including 12-months free accounting, cloud computing credits as well as support in building leadership, resilience skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Since launching in 2016, our ventures have:
£17m Raised in investment
£20m 400+ Generated in revenue
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London Demo Day The wonderful thing about this event is it brings together people to inspire each other, to listen to each other’s pitches, to see and experience the possible.
Three of London’s leading universities, 15 ventures and more than 100 UK and international investors gathered to pitch, listen to and invest in world-changing concepts at the first ever London Demo Day at King’s College London’s Bush House last September.
Anne Boden MBE, CEO of Starling Bank
The aim of the event was to promote the potential of university start-ups to a new audience of at least 100 investors, 20% of whom had never previously engaged with the sector. Happily, we were able to attract 109 investors, 51% of which were new to universities.
Events such as London Demo Day are great for investors like us to connect with universities and a one-stop shop for sourcing innovative ideas and businesses. Frank Tong, Managing Partner at QBN Capital
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University start-ups handpicked from King’s20 Accelerator, Imperial’s Venture Catalyst Challenge and UCL’s Hatchery
presented their ideas to local and global investors to secure investment and support. The innovative new businesses extended across a diverse range of industries, including healthcare, education, AI and robotics. They included Panakeia, a universal one-step engine for precision cancer diagnosis; Polipop, delivering flushable and biodegradable sanitary pads; and Musemio, a personalised virtual reality educational platform that brings culture to life for kids. By working together, King’s, UCL and Imperial were able to attract new investors to their combined pitching event – half of whom hadn’t worked with the universities before.
109
51%
Investors attended London Demo Day
Of investors who attended had never previously enagaged with university start-ups
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Digital Demo Day Each year, the ventures that form the King’s20 Accelerator programme are given the opportunity to pitch in front of the Entrepreneurship Institute’s 400-strong investor community. While the global pandemic has changed the world as we know it, we affirmed our commitment to showcasing the best and brightest entrepreneurial talent that our award-winning programme has to offer through an innovative Digital Demo platform.
Unlike a traditional Demo Day event, our Digital Demo was available for investors and visitors to visit and explore over a period of eight weeks.
542 1900+ Investors in our database
Active engagements with the Digital Demo platform
King’s have built a strong reputation in the start-up scene and it is great that they are still able to showcase interesting and varied ventures. The advantage of a digital demo day is that you can view ventures in your own time, in the comfort of your own home, putting them on your radar where appropriate. Stephen Page, CEO Start-up Funding Club
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StepEx Many key professions experience crippling shortages due to exclusion of the less-wealthymajority from qualifications. This is caused by the tens-ofthousands-of-pounds shortfall between government funding and savings / “bank-of-mumand-dad”. Traditional lending is unavailable for those whose future earnings are likely to justify finance but cannot evidence this with their credit history. Early stage companies raise equity when they cannot raise debt, enabling innovations that would not otherwise have been possible. StepEx is launching
an “equity-style” financing instrument for students. More accessible based on future potential income and more affordable because the total amount to be repaid is linked to income earned. StepEx fund post-graduate and professional qualifications that lead to high graduate salaries. Their initial market is the 25% of successful UK qualification applicants who withdraw due to an inability to secure finance, representing ~£2bn per year. Globally the market for professional qualifications exceeds £600bn per year.
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PitchMe Ltd Most recruitment technologies rely on an analysis of a candidate’s resume. As a result, many candidates who have better skillset, but not relevant employment history or skills on their CV, are often not selected for further assessment and evaluation. This has contributed to inequality around employment opportunities, and limited the ability of some candidates to get jobs that match their skills, as well as the capacity for companies to find and hire the best candidates for their needs.
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PitchMe has developed the SmartMe™ profile – a multi layered view of candidate’s skills created using a combination of traditional sources and digital traits, eliminating bias from the screening process. They also offer a digital dashboard for those managing professional development and helps candidates and employers in the continuous process of reskilling. PitchMe operates in the major European tech hubs, in the US and CIS region. Their target
audiences are SMEs with no internal HR team or recruitment budget. In August 2020, PitchMe secured $1.2 million in a seed funding round led by New Yorkbased Starta Ventures and joined by a UK-based family office and a number of angel investors.
Parent Suportal One million children in the UK are disabled and the current ‘system’ is a mess. No one is coordinating information or resources and preparing families for the turbulent journey ahead. The families with the least voice receive the least resource. 69% of families never receive any support (Disabled Children’s Partnerships, 2019). Parent Suportal’s platform consists of an online community (Mumsnet for disability), a bespoke and comprehensive information directory and a curated online shop. They aim to be the trusted partner of every disabled family helping them through all milestones from aged 0-25 years. Parent Suportal was part of the King’s20 Accelerator 2019-2020,
and during lockdown suffered a loss of 80% of their customers due to shielding and were forced to furlough their team after finding that they were ineligible for support grants. Determined to not let 6 years of hard work and a life changing service close, they quickly adapted and maximised revenue streams, accelerating the launch of their shop focussing solely on therapy and rehabilitation equipment and online coaching for children with physical disabilities.
I am privileged to be a part of such a prestigious and competitive, awardwinning programme. The confidence and skills gained as an entrepreneur are unparalleled. Learning from and leaning into world-class experts and being part of a community of start-ups is an opportunity of a lifetime Samantha Tebb
Since April they have seen £25k+ in revenue, secured funding for their first employee, have an app in development and over 180 members in their community.
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Start-Up Visas The Start-Up visa is a new 2-year visa route which is for early-stage, but high potential, entrepreneurs who are starting a business in the UK for the first time. The Start-Up visa is for people setting up a new business in the UK which is innovative, viable and scalable, with the ultimate aim that the business has the potential to become fullyintegrated and a contributing part of the UK economy. The Entrepreneurship Institute acts as an endorsement body on behalf of the Home Office.
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Members of our team also act as mentors for those who are successful in their applications for Start-Up Visas, and we have worked to create a community of peers to help them thrive.
10 Visa endorsements were made this year
2019-20 Visa Endorsees included: RevCount - a project
management platform that prevents scope creep
Trade with the UK - platform
to help other countries access goods from the UK
Fantastic Beasts - a platform to help start up founders connect with investors
The Neuroscience of Entrepreneurship The Neuroscience of Entrepreneurship is a research project that sets out to answer two questions; what happens in your brain when you are being entrepreneurial and how can you make this happen more, and is funded by our Professor of the Practice of Entrepreneurship, Stefan Allesch-Taylor CBE FKC.
The EBC is the cornerstone of our exciting Neuroscience of Entrepreneurship project. As the first research collaboration between the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience and the Entrepreneurship Institute, we aim, through the use of self-report measures, cognitive tasks and structural & functional neuroimaging, to characterise entrepreneurial cognition, how it changes with experience, and how it can be developed. Dr Vincent Giampietro
Education systems around the world support people to become more entrepreneurial in the interests of innovation, problem solving and economic progress. Through our research we aim to discover more about the neuroscience of entrepreneurship and how education systems could be developed to support more people to become increasingly entrepreneurial
entrepreneurial people. Produced by a collaboration between experts in entrepreneurship and cognitive neuroscience from King’s and Imperial College London, this study aims to uncover what enables entrepreneurs to spot ideas, take action, persevere and cope with uncertain environments. Data collected can be analysed and compared to an existing database of over half-a-million people’s cognitive scores.
The communication strategy driven by the Entrepreneurship Institute resulted in over 2000 people interacting with the EBC from its launch in July 2020, 750 of whom completed the first half and 490 the second half of the testing, from 81 countries around the world. 55% of participants who accessed the challenge were The Entrepreneurial Brain female. The ages of participants Challenge (EBC) is the first stage ranged from 18 years old to 65+, of research into the neuroscience with majority (68%) in the 18-34 of entrepreneurship, taking range, showing the diversity a data-driven approach to of countries, gender and ages understand the personality, reached. thinking and cognition of
2000 People engaged with the EBC
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Countries represented within the EBC A 24
What did we learn this year? Confronted with a pandemic, we needed to practice what we preach entrepreneurial skills.
In the face of a crisis, we found new audiences and new engagement opportunities
Covid-19 gave us a choice. We could have chosen to allow the global crisis to debilitate us, and allow it to force us into positions of weakness or defeat where we halt everything we’ve been working towards.
The coronavirus put a halt to many work experience programmes in the spring and summer of 2020, with research suggesting three in five employers have cancelled work experience because of Covid-19.
But that wouldn’t be entrepreneurial, would it? Instead, we took our Seven Skills in our stride and saw this challenging time as an opportunity to explore new ways of working, to innovate, to make progress and to help those around us.
We knew this would have a profound effect on our student body, who were left with few choices without work or travel options this year. Additionally, we also knew that within a few years, as the pandemic comes under control, they would be competing with younger students whose career trajectory was not quite as badly impacted.
This year, despite everything, we continued to deliver on our mission, across community, skills, ideas and ventures with renewed perspective and an entrepreneurial spirit. A new summer skills course in the face of hundreds of cancelled internships, a Digital Demo Day in place of our annual event; we thought lean, disrupted our usual way of doing things, demonstrated incredible resilience and got it done.
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Our Skill Up Look Sharp course was designed for students whose internships were cancelled, but also King’s offer-holders, whose futures may have felt uncertain. The popularity of the course saw us extend the opportunity to King’s Summer School students and the faculties, resulting in huge engagement and a robust pipeline for our Enterprise Award in the next year.
The New Normal of online events and engagement There have been some interesting insights from our pivot to online events: Speakers were more generous, interactive, accessible and authentic in a virtual event. All participants and panellists had a richer, personal and more meaningful experience. Attendees were more comfortable asking questions and being more active participants and interactions with speakers more personable and direct. Therefore Q&As ended up being more conversational. Online events are more inclusive and accessible. This applies to everything from the caption functionality, the ability to record and re-watch at your own speed or in your own time-zone. Those who have other commitment and responsibilities are more likely and able to participate. The conversion rate from sign up to attendee was higher as the level of personal commitments and effort is less than an inperson event – we have also been very compelling in the first 10 minutes to keep them “in the room”
An entrepreneurial journey begins with a single step but which one is it? While we are able to track and monitor the number of people who attend our events, workshops, competitions and even on our social media, it’s very difficult for us to get detailed insights on how people start or continue their journey with us. We are currently working with the university on a CRM project which is hoped will optimise the way we use data so we can learn more about how our community engages with us so that we provide the best possible student experience.
has created a sustainable pipeline, it is important that we are also attuned to other intersecting forms of inequality that exist within our space. In order to do this effectively, we will be collecting, monitoring and analysing our equal opportunity data to better understand what groups are under-represented in our community and the barriers that exist for participation and success.
Entrepreneurial, not just Entrepreneurs!
empower people to be more employable as innovative thinkers, creative problemsolvers and compelling leaders in any organisation or industry. Our skills-first approach in this space is new, and we are working against deeply ingrained stereotypes of entrepreneurs to promote a more accessible and engaging offering where we invite everyone to discover an entrepreneurial version of themselves.
Our key message is that everyone can be entrepreneurial.
Digging deeper into our diversity data
Many enterprise education centres within UK universities solely focus on scaling start We are incredibly proud of ups. While venture support is the Women Entrepreneurs still a fundamental part of our Programme and how it has offering, we have renewed our successfully achieved its aim of focus and expanded our remit gender parity in the King’s20 to promote entrepreneurial Accelerator. While we are skills which we believe will confident that the work that has gone into the programme
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