Business, Innovation and Ideas: Ideas for Student Enterprise Societies

Some great fun events and support structures that all university enterprise departments should help their most enterprising students to provide.

Make sure there’s free food and drink, buy it from the union,
Make sure they’re immediately after the last lecture of the day (OR CREATE A reserved SLOT!)
Approach brilliant ALUMNI and pay their expenses, nothing more!
Find a good venue on campus – cabaret seating is nice.
Get a microphone, projector and flip chart reserved every week and set up by your IT crowd.
Make sure your students project manage them, but give them a guidance document to help.

Get an interesting judge with good credentials to introduce the competition. Give students 30 minutes to come up with a business idea from scratch, and write a one minute pitch for it.
Get them to pitch, be strict on the time limit (use a big clock?)
Give personalised constructive feedback to the competitors after all have pitched.
Give the winners a prize!

This is something we are yet to do at Fish on Toast. It’s a big event but can generate media attention and significant hype on campus with teams battling it out in full view of the rest of the cohort.
Find a different sponsor company every day for 5 days then have a massive dinner party on the Friday night.
Each sponsor proposes a challenge for the teams, presented early in the morning on each day. Give them a 30 min speaker event at the same time relevant to the skills they will need that day.
You can incorporate sales, marketing, creative business idea development, team building and public speaking. All amazing skills for the participant’s CVs.
You should put all profits from any selling into a charitable pot, give the winners of each day a prize relevant to the particular sponsor, and their overall winners a cash prize.
Great sponsors to increase your publicity are Local Radio stations, who can cover the story all week.
For a good example of a student entrepreneur’s society doing this kind of event themselves look to York Entrepreneurs who ran an event like this in 2009 and 2007. Oxford Entrepreneurs will be running one this year too.

Full day means 11am till 6pm.
It also includes a FREE LUNCH and refreshments.
Get yourself a trends panel with a Chairperson– try to find young speakers who can relate to the audience. The tech startup industry in London is a good place to start.
Teach the students how to pitch for investment.
Outline the reasons for a business plan and what to include but don’t go into detail.
Run speed networking to help attendees meet each other.
Run a short pitching competition during the day.

Wane Hemmingway backed an initiative in London last year I think that created a funky looking mobile shop, from which creative people could sell their products in high footfall areas at an affordable rent. Boris Johnson loved the idea, and so do I.
I think you should all get one or steal the idea.
Find somewhere on campus in a high footfall area where you can build a small, lockable booth. There needs to be a covered walk-in display area and a till.
Rent this out ONLY to student businesses. They could be running a big event, selling student art, fashion, anything really. Create a nominal charge for use, say £20 per hour, of the pod and create a straightforward system that only allows students to make their booking up to a few weeks in advance.
Now you have visible student enterprise on campus.

Dedicated room or deskspace with internet connection, postal address for small mail.
Area where students can legally do business without worry about council tax.
Support staff to offer advice when dealing with the university and union.
Meeting room spaces available for booking.
Secure Locker/ drawer space.
Require a business plan and pitch to restrict use.
If no area exists on campus, contact local office rental providers and negotiate free/ heavily discounted deal for university students.

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