Give me £100 and I’ll start a business!

Brief description of session and activities

The first time we ran this unit in Summer 2012, 22 groups of 6 students started and ran a small business over 8 weeks.

The feedback from this was fantastic. Initially conceived as a way of bringing finance to life, the students said they learned so much more.

Enhancement ideas for this year’s presentation are in progress and depending on funding success include the introduction of a mentoring scheme across student cohorts. External sponsorship is also being negotiated which would include the provision of industry business advisors to support students.

This “paper” intends to showcase the unit and its outcomes with a 20 minute slide and video presentation to explain what happened. Then participants will be asked to consider how they could incorporate such a unit into their curriculum and encouraged to ask questions of both the presenter and the students (15 mins).

Suggestions for improving the unit and enhancing the learning and teaching experience will be gathered at the end (10 mins) using Socrative software – to showcase the use of this electronic response tool.

This unit embeds enterprise skills into the curriculum allowing the students to experiment first hand with innovative business ideas. In this unit we are bringing key employability skills across traditional curriculum borders and embedding them to contribute to assessed unit outcomes rather than being taught as an optional “add on”.

How will students be involved in the session?

Students will be on hand to talk about their experiences. There will also be some video interview footage of students.

What will participants take away from the session?

Inspiration to include a unit like this in their course. The beginnings of a support network for academics who wish to include Enterprise in the curriculum.