Since our launch event, we have received over 300 entries for the first stage of our business creation competition. The Judges have had a tough time picking the winners due to the exceptionally high quality of the entries this year. Winners will be announced nextThursday 18:30-22:00, 20-Nov-2014 at the William Gates Building. Be sure to confirm your tickets here.
Three prominent entrepreneurs will speak and present the awards. Their names and bios are as follows:
Simon Stockley
Simon Stockley is currently the Senior Teaching Faculty in Entrepreneurship at Judge Business School and the Deputy Director at the Accelerate Coventry incubator. Simon’s major defining purpose is to help people achieve their potential in life. He believes that everyone has entrepreneurial potential but that in most cases this is ‘socialised’ out of them by their upbringing and ‘the system’. His great passion is helping people to rediscover this potential both for their own benefit and that of society as a whole. Simon is highly reputed in the world of entrepreneurship: his entrepreneurship course for the MSc Management programme at Imperial College was ranked 1st in the world by the Financial Times in October 2009, while his MBA entrepreneurship course was ranked 4th in the world by the Financial Times (2011). He was also the ‘Most Respected’ member of faculty 2010.
Gonzalo Garcia
A home-grown Coventry student of seven years, Gonzalo co-founded the online education company Transmission Education (www.transmission-education.com), along with friends Peter McFarlane and Simon Smart. The company provides a solution to the geographical mismatch of supply and demand in the >$100b market of private academic tuition. Transmission Education won CUE’s £5k Ideas Take Flight competition last year, and has nearly 700 Coventry students and alumni registered as potential tutors. Gonzalo describes the CUE competition, together with the subsequent prize trip to Silicon Valley, as one of the most important contributors to the company’s development.
John Bird
John Bird MBE is a British social entrepreneur. He is best known as the founder of The Big Issue, a magazine that is edited by professional journalists and sold by street vendors affected by homelessness. Since The Big Issue was launched in 199, it has helped thousands of vulnerable people take control of their lives. It currently works with around 2000 individuals across the UK offering them the opportunity to earn a legitimate income; to ‘help them to help themselves’. Over the past two decades the magazine has become synonymous with challenging, independent journalism, and renowned for securing exclusive interviews with the most elusive of superstars. It currently circulates around 100,000 copies every week. John Bird was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Business from Plymouth University in 2013.