Dragons' Den - 2018
I was so impressed by all the ideas and the confidence of the pitches and supporting information.
MSc Enterprise & Entrepreneurship students kicked off the academic year with a Dragons’ Den style challenge. Following their induction, they were split into five teams to come up with a new venture idea in the areas of: Food/Drink, Sport, Music, Travel and Education. They all received training on how to pitch to the “Dragons”. CEES Enterprise Ambassador Bec Evans explained
I spend a lot of time with start-ups at similar pitch competitions and the quality of your student’s work was as good - if not better - than a lot of what start-up founders share.
Our 29 new students assembled expectantly in the “Den” to be confronted by four “Dragons” – CEES Enterprise Ambassadors Bec Evans and Tom Allchurch, Twinkl Chief Technology Officer Pete Casson and Stephen King, Director of MSc Enterprise & Entrepreneurship.
The five ideas were:
- SeatEats (Sport) – an at seat delivery service within sports stadiums
- UniVision (Education) – tours for international students considering UK universities
- MusicMate (Music) – a website connecting people who want to learn an instrument with teachers
- Junkett (Travel) – a live streaming app for people who cannot travel to interact with people travelling to destinations they want to see
- International Recipe Basket (Food/Drink) – authentic home cooking for international students to give them a taste of home.
It was a close-fought contest between UniVision and MusicMate with MusicMate just coming out ahead – largely due to the fantastic presentation by the team which started with Jesha playing “You are my sunshine” on her ukulele! It certainly grabbed the audience’s attention. Bec Evans went on to advise the students:
The most important skills a start-up founder can have are learning from what they do, such as filtering out what is and what isn’t good and relevant feedback, and using that learning to improve their ideas, pivot, or build new ideas.