UCL Advances

Written by Mansour Abdulghaffar, UCL MSc Technology Entrepreneurship Student

The London Entrepreneurs’ Challenge (E-Challenge) is an annual competition hosted at UCL by UCL Advances. It forms the first stage for staff and students looking to start a new business and this year’s competition brought students together from a wide variety of disciplines from all four partner institutions: UCL, Birkbeck, The London Business School and The Royal Veterinary College.

Tuesday the 14th December marked the end of the competition’s second phase, where cash prizes totalling £13,000 awaited four lucky teams. Each team was required to submit a full business plan in addition to the presentations given on the day to the judges; which consisted of academic staff, business support experts and external serial entrepreneurs. These were scrutinised closely before announcing the winning team to the audience and competing teams.

In terms of student’s perceptions on the E-Challenge, overall students were very positive about the experience, and would highly recommend it to their future peers. This is reflected in one of this year’s participants, Grant from “One to One Medicine” – a website aimed at guiding students through the complex process of applying to UK medical schools – who was encouraged to enter The E-Challenge by last years grand winner, Chester Sinclare.

Students describe the E-Challenge as an opportunity to allow them to express their ideas, regardless of how unorthodox they are, to an expert committee and receive realistic feedback that would prepare them for the outside world, should they wish to seek external funding or approach venture capitalists. Also, for the MSc Technology Entrepreneurship students studying at UCL, many see it as an excellent playground to practice for their dissertations and support their regular academic studies. Others see it as an excellent "motivation tool” that has pushed them to create “live” working prototypes in relatively short periods, such as the Webcam Dance Battles – a website allowing users to challenge one another on their dance moves. This year, the E-Challenge awarded the grand prize of £5,000 to “BarGain”, a marketing mobile application that allows users to share marketing promotions using their social networks in order to receive discounts for spreading the message. BarGain also won Phase One of the competition. These funds will be invested to develop the idea to a “proof-of-concept”, which will be used to enter further competitions and generate further finance, in order to develop the product further and perhaps entice external venture capital funding.

The runner-up of the postgraduate/staff category, worth £3,000, was awarded to “Eeve”, the team behind a concept for a mobile application guiding partygoers to the hottest local events, as reviewed by fellow users of the app.

Similarly, the runner-up of the undergraduate category, also worth £3,000, was awarded to “One to One Medicine”, where its creator has envisioned a platform that allows potential medicine students to be mentored and guided directly by a lecturer from their Universities during the complex application process. It is worth mentioning that Grant currently has 37 people signed up for his potential workforce, by far the largest workforce seen in the E-Challenge!

Finally, the Provost’s Prize of £2,000 was awarded to Micro Tailor, an inter-university team consisting of members of UCL and the London Business School that has put together a balanced team of technical and business skills to develop a disruptive technology that allows them to screen future potential medicines much more quickly, allowing them to come to market faster.