What's Up: Accelerator London + Enterprise London Met
Since moving down to London I've been up to lots of interesting things and having ball at Accelerator which is a great place to work, lots of fun and a brilliant enterprising environment to work in.
The London Met Enterprise department is based here, which is great for students who get to learn in a building full of businesses and startups from 1 month to 4 years old in a range of different industries which is a brilliant opportunity that students feed back as being something they love about taking part in enterprise events with us.
A few things we've been up to:
The Hatchery - Is our student and graduate startup programme. Think accelerator programme LITE. Hatchery Tenants selected from our bootcamp have 6 months with us where they form their own community of startups, attend social and educational sessions and are mentored by the team towards one of our three main goals:
•To be generating income and be self sufficient enough to move into paid office space to keep building their businesses. •To have developed their businesses to a stage ready for investment or more specialised acceleration programmes. •To have learnt and failed quickly within our low-risk environment, ready to start something new with great networks and experience on their side.
http://www.accelerator-london.com/blog/uncategorized/welcome-hatchery/
Big Idea Challenge - This year at Enterprise London Met we decided to do things a little differently, after 11 years of a hugely successful business plan competition we thought we would shake things up and create a competition that was accessible to the wide range of students and graduates, was based on ACTION, communication and reflection!
"In the Big Idea Challenge Round 1 we invite you to tell us about problems you think need solving in order to win cash prizes… Simple as that. It’s ok if you can’t think of a solution at this stage – we want the problems to start with! Winners from round 1will be invited to round 2 to work with experts to solve problems, develop your concept and create a video and crowd-support campaign for your idea. The final round is a pitch to a panel of experts fighting for money and support to help make you Big Ideas a reality."
We threw the challengers in the deep end with only 6 days to create a video and 6 days to promote it, with many challengers having never made a video or even having a twitter account before the challenge. We are just about to launch into the final round but were astounded by the crowd-support campaigns that got 101,978 interactions with the videos, facebook comments and twitter endorsements!
Valuing Student Talent - Enterprise at London Met thrives because we utilise our strongest resource which is our students. Our students co-ordinate activities within the building and our events, they work on our social media campaigns, they are responsible for the interior design of the building and the complete refit of the Hatchery, they make our marketing material and they run the Entrepreneurs Society LME from our office. We also know how student confidence can be built by working with those outside of their own discipline in events that paid up students with our Hatchery businesses such as the CollabJAM. We also host the Fashion Marketing - Fashion Business Project here at Accelerator, helping students to create and launch their own fashion businesses.
Collaboration and Network Events - Accelerator is a community and we think that what makes us special is how we support each other in-house and how we utilise the talent and expertise within our community and in the wider London Met and Tech City communities. Some of the things we do to encourage networking and support are pizza and pitch nights, social events and crowd-mentoring evenings.