NovaUCD hosts student entrepreneur accelerator
Seventeen postgraduate and 10 undergraduate students are participating in the tenth NovaUCD Student Enterprise Competition, which began today.
The four-week accelerator programme for student entrepreneurs features 14 early-stage ventures and 27 participating students across a wide range of business ideas ranging from aircraft maintenance to sustainable fashion to digital health, and legal services. Up for grabs are a €3,000 tech sustainability prize sponsored by Terra Solar and a €3,000 NovaUCD one to watch prize which, will be decided after a pitch contest.
Tom Flanagan, director of enterprise & commercialisation, NovaUCD, said: “Over the next few weeks we will be supporting the participating student entrepreneurs as they begin the process of accelerating the translation of their business ideas and concepts into start-ups. A key objective of this annual competition is to provide students with the skills, the confidence and the opportunity to further develop their ideas and to hopefully in time launch their start-ups on a national and even an international stage.”
The programme includes a series of structured workshops and interactive workshops on topics such as customer development; value proposition; working in teams; design thinking; prototyping, environment mapping; financial planning and effective fundraising and pitching.
Two new components have been introduced to the programme this year. The first is focused on supporting the students to think about how they can create AI powered start-ups, what are the tools and opportunities to leverage generative AI, not only in their products or services, but also in their business operations. The second is to provide ‘checkpoints’ as the students develop their business ideas where they can reflect on the UN’s sustainable development goals and how best to align their emerging start-ups with these goals.
More 70 early-stage ventures and some 170 students have completed the NovaUCD Student Enterprise Competition to date.
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