UCL hosts launch of CleanTech Challenge 2016

The CleanTech Challenge is a global business plan competition for innovative clean technology business ideas. Organised by postgraduates at London Business School (LBS) and UCL (including UCL VEIV students), the competition brings together business and engineering students from universities across the world to create viable cleantech startups.

The competition has three rounds and culminates at the two-day Bootcamp final in London in which teams are mentored by industry experts and compete for the £10,000 prize.

The competition was established in 2009 by Tim Barnes and Jeff Skinner, respective directors of UCL Advances and Deloitte Institute for Innovation & Entrepreneurship at LBS, who wanted to “create a new forum in which students with promising early stage ideas would be challenged to work them up into viable ventures”.

This year, the competition is being run in collaboration with the UCL Energy Institute and its director, Bob Lowe, who will be overseeing key aspects of the competition.

Winners of the 2009 competition, Greenlease, evolved into successful energy reduction investment business Decarbon Capital. Their founder Dan Saunders says, “It is a really safe environment to test your business model and your ideas. The mentors and judges have terrific experience”. Other finalists’ ideas have included turning windows into solar panels, cleaning arsenic from drinking water, and recovering waste heat from HGV engines to bacteria pumping biofuels.