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By Janette Junghaus Senior Programme Officer for Entrepreneurship and Jodie Connon Programme Officer for Entrepreneurship UCL Innovation & Enterprise
Our core team of nine staff forming Innovation & Enterprise’s Entrepreneurship team may seem a little on the lean side given the colossal size of the cumulative vision that drives us.
It isn’t made up of just the vision that motivates us individually in performing our specific roles – in our different ways, we’re each fired up by the different parts that we can play in helping to open doors to opportunities and give life to ideas.
It also encompasses the collective vision of the service that we deliver for the UCL community as a whole – empowering our students and colleagues on their journeys in creating real impact in the world outside of academia. Journeys that can start with a few playful steps but may be laden with untold possibilities.
Most importantly perhaps, we are fuelled by the kaleidoscopic array of ambitions that cross our threshold every day at BaseKX *, embodied by the students, staff and alumni that we support in our Hatchery startup space as well as those who engage in our various programmes. For each individual’s vision that we invest our energy into, our own expands just a little bit more.
Being embedded within such a diverse intellectual community here at UCL is a privilege. It gives us the satisfaction of being able to feel that it’s perfectly acceptable – perhaps even our duty – to push those who choose to engage with us into forward-thinking directions where they often themselves out of their comfort zones. But we genuinely believe that many of the attributes that push somebody into the academic sphere are also excellent foundations for an entrepreneurial frame of mind and innovative success. Where people don’t see this within themselves, we do.
* BaseKX is UCL’s startup incubator hub in Kings Cross, and is also the home of a variety of training programmes, networking events, bootcamps and competitions with an entrepreneurial focus. It is open to UCL students, staff and alumni alike.
