50 budding student entrepreneurs from UWE’s two entrepreneurial degrees were put through their paces at a 4-day Venture Week. Together they experienced how it is to work in teams to build proper foundations to business ideas using Design Thinking and Lean Startup models, presenting their ideas to a panel of judges from the business world.
“Don’t fall in love with your solution but be curious about solving a problem”, was one of the main learnings of Venture Week, an event designed for Year 1 entrepreneurship students. The 4-day business incubation event was run as a collaboration between two UWE Bristol’s entrepreneurship degrees (Business Team Entrepreneurship, and Sports Business and Entrepreneurship which is run in partnership with UWE Bristol and Bristol Robins Foundation).
The projects were a great showcase of creativity. There was a real energy in the room and it’s clear these young entrepreneurs are committed to making a positive impact.
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The entrepreneurship students are tasked with working in teams to find a problem society that they’d like to solve by creating a business idea. Entrepreneurship is all about business idea – but too often the problem we are trying to solve gets forgotten. The students spend 4 days finding real potential users that might be facing the problem, validating whether the problem is actually a real problem with these users, and whether their hypothesis of a solution (business idea) is something a user would be willing to use. This kind of iterative approach is at the heart of many books, including “The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses” by Eric Ries, and the whole idea is to validate an approach before putting more planning or resources into the idea we have.
The teams presented the problem, their business idea and 4-day work process to a panel of judges, including Maria Berryman from YTKO, Rosie Bennett from SetSquared Bristol, Joe Alford from Southern Academy of Sport (also a Team Coach for the BA(Hons) Sports Business and Entrepreneurship), Emily Griffin from Staying Social and Charlie Hunt from Origin Ops. You can read further thoughts of the panel member Emily Griffin in this Linkedin post.
The four best teams won a visit to the SetSquared Bristol, a startup incubator to understand what an incubator does, what are the barriers startups face – and what value could any incubator provide for an entrepreneur.
About the two entrepreneurship degrees
BA(Hons) Business (Team Entrepreneurship) and BA(Hons) Sports Business and Entrepreneurship are entrepreneurship and business studies degrees by UWE Bristol which have 100% positive professional outcomes (all graduates either establish their own company, go to employment or to further studies). BA(Hons) Sports Business and Entrepreneurship is run by Robins Foundation in partnership with UWE Bristol.
During their three years, the students develop the skills, creativity, confidence and knowledge to work well in any work environment, preparing them for the world of work as entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs or teampreneurs. You can learn more about the degrees by continuing to browse this website using the navigator menu above.