Thanks for all who made the £1k Training Event last night!

The video of the judges’ talk is available for viewing now with the slides downloadable here.

Part I

Part II

Thanks to all who made it to the Co-Founder Speed Dating! We hope you have met some interesting people and now on the road to starting a venture and to enter the CUE £1k Competition!

If you are still looking for team mates, CUE is proud to announce the launch of a trial version of the CUE Idea Marketplace, where you can post your ideas and advertisement for people to join your team.

Give it a go and let us know how it went (by commenting below)!

CUE Idea Marketplace

More photos can be viewed on CUE Facebook Page.

By Nicholas Tan

Almost 100 students, aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned serial entrepreneurs from around Coventry came together to share their ideas and to network at tonight’s inaugural Co-founder Speed Dating event organized by the Coventry University Entrepreneurs (CUE).

Participants were given the opportunity to interact through a fast paced speed dating format, where they had 2 minutes to exchange ideas, and business cards, before being rotated to different partners.

This was designed to give participants the opportunity to meet as many like-minded individuals as possible within a short time, in hopes that they will be able to build strong teams to further develop their businesses and ideas.

Over 20 individuals also took to the stage to give 1 minute elevator pitches of their business ideas to the crowd.

These business ideas spanned a wide range of areas – from the new methods to create embryonic stem cells to a website that analyses patterns in grocery shopping and even an attempt at generating coherent conversational threads from random twitter posts.

Feedback from the participants was extremely positive and most went home with new business partners and even new business ideas.

The climax of the night came when CUE vice president Michelle Stewart announced the 25 winners of the £100 for 100 words competition.

The winning entries for this year can be viewed at www.cue.org.uk.

Next up in CUE’s Business Creation Competition is the £1k competition and it is now officially open. Entrants are required to submit a 1000 word executive summary of their business plan by 20th January 2012 and will stand a chance of winning £1000.

Entry to the £1k competition is open to all and not limited to those that participated in the £100 competition.

To provide additional support for aspiring entrepreneurs in preparing for this upcoming competition, CUE will also be organizing a training session led by two of the competition judges next Wednesday, 23rd November.
Interested parties can register at http://cue1000training2011.eventbrite.com/.

This year we are giving a way 5 additional prizes of £100!

Are you one of the lucky 25? If not, don’t fret. Join the £1k Competition opening on 23rd November 2011 to win £1000 prizes!

(Winners are in alphabetical order based on the idea name.)

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Want to learn to write like a CEO?

Come join us for a free training!

Proudly presented by CUE:

The CUE £1K Competition

Training Event

Date and Time: 18:00-21:00 Wednesday, 23 November, 2011

Location: Lecture Room 4 (LR4), Department of Engineering

Register at: http://cue1000training2011.eventbrite.com/

The £1k Competition represents the next stage of the Entrepreneurs Business Creation Competition. New competition entrants are welcome. It is not required to have been a 100 word entrant or winner to enter this stage of the contest.  To enter the competition you must submit a 1000 word Executive Summary by the 20th of January. To help you write the best possible entry, CUE is running a £1K Competition Training Event on Wednesday, 23rd November 2011.

Two of our competition judges will talk at the event about what they want to see in the 1K business creation competition, followed by surgeries with CUE mentors, covering topics including Market research, Finance, Intellectual Property, and Legal, basically everything you need to know at this stage of the competition.

Agenda of the evening:

18:00  Arrival and registration

18:30  Main speech: What judges expect for an executive summary

19:00  Networking and Surgeries with mentors and experts in Market Research, Finance, Intellectual Property and General Legal Issues

(Photo by OneLeap)

By Shakiba Kaveh

H.I.P.P.B.E.R.T ! This was the buzz word of the night! Until that night, it is difficult to realise the power of a good pitch in attracting clients, investors and kick-starting an entrepreneurial career! Two of the Coventry alumni and Simon Campbell, now a serial entrepreneur pitched us in 10 minutes how to give a “pick-up pitch”.  If you can articulate your idea in two sentences that is also appealing to the investor’s background, then you’ve nailed it! explains Simon. You need to Hook your audience with a magical sentence then Identify the Problem, Propose your idea and explain them the Benefits, indicate your Execution strategies, Repeat your idea again and Take action and ask for their business card. Simple!

This is why you see many scientists with patents but very few with a business. We are used to having at least 20 minutes for long and joyful discussions and this is often one of the pitfalls which we may fall into while pitching.

The event was a success and people have certainly learned something which they did not know before. We are not born with a natural instinct of entrepreneurship; we have to be trained and it takes a certain spirit to be one, a phoenix rising from the ashes type of mentality and CUE is doing exactly that.

Register here: http://cuespeeddating2011.eventbrite.com/