WBS Student Entrepreneurs triumph again

The annual Be Your Own Boss competition, organised by Warwick Entrepreneurs Society and supported by NACUE, a national organisation that supports and represents university enterprise societies and student entrepreneurs, came to a head last month. Kostas Mavroulakis, WBS Enterprise Hub Student Enterprise Officer, reports on the results.

On 18 February 2010, student entrepreneurs from Warwick Business School and the wider University participated in the annual Be Your Own Boss event sponsored by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Accenture and the WBS Enterprise Hub. As a Dragon's Den style competition, it aims to inspire and challenge students to create their own opportunities to start their own business or develop entrepreneurial skills. The competition has two streams, Early Stage Business, and Business Ideas.

For the second consecutive year, WBS students triumphed by winning the Early Stage Business category with their business uni4ya.com. They pitched to a 200-strong student audience and a panel of judges from the competition sponsors, including WBS Teaching Fellow Nicholas Wake and successful entrepreneurs.

Set up by 20-year old Frenchman Jean Malissard, (2nd year BSc International Business), and his colleagues Simon Cohen and Jonathan Bevan, the web site serves as an intermediary between university students and local businesses. It provides an online interactive directory of relevant information about local businesses, events, discounts and more while automatically notifying students of the latest updates. Co-founder Jean believes it "provided an excellent opportunity to display our creativity and hard-work" and businesses are approaching them to "benefit from our abilities in connecting them with a student community". He "saw entrepreneurship as an ideal source of income and recognition" and found his education at WBS useful for running the business. As overall winners, the team won £1,000, access to the Business Life package at Warwick and a business mentor for 12-months provided by the WBS Enterprise Hub.

Jean was also involved in the team Creativia, who were runners up in the competition, along with team-mates Dobromira Boyadjieva (2nd year BSc Management) and Vladimir Tsekov (2nd year Accounting and Finance). Creativia is an advertising agency which provides take-away cup sleeves featuring advertisements of products, services and solutions for use at conferences, exhibitions and event venues.

Dobromira comments, "We think the feedback and mentoring sessions we have won will be of great value. The competition gives participants a great chance to test their presentation skills and ultimately test how strongly they believe in the success of their idea."

The winner of the Business Ideas category was Alex Chamberlain, (BSc Mathematics).

The competition student coordinators Michael Stones and Dominic Phillips believe that students should take part in this valuable entrepreneurial opportunity. Michael Stones believes that "it gives entrepreneurial Warwick students the opportunity to express their commercial awareness while improving pitching skills."

"The standard of the entries was excellent and it was a pleasure to see so many good ideas from Warwick students; the competition is a testament to Warwick's entrepreneurial spirit," says Dominic Phillips.

Kostas concludes: This is not the first time WBS students have been involved in enterpreneurial activities. Late last year, Warwick Entrepreneurs brought Global Entrepreneurship Week to Warwick which included four days of enterprise activities. This included renowned entrepreneurs such as Sean Phelan (founder of Multimap.com) while challenging students through the Oripprentice competition which they ran with Oriflame Cosmetics UK. The competition challenged over 50 Warwick students to develop entrepreneurial skills by working in teams to promote and sell cosmetics products over a 10-day period. Warwick Entrepreneurs is also a founding member of NACUE which represents over 70 enterprise societies.