Three start-up businesses won funding from a University of Kent programme to support future entrepreneurs.<\/p>\n
Twelve new businesses, all founded by students at Kent Business School<\/a>, pitched for finance from judges in the final stage of the Business Start-Up Journey. Ideas ranged from new bio-medical equipment, hydro-electricity and a service to reuse wedding gowns.<\/p>\n The first prize of \u00a31,000 was won by Andrew Christopher, who has created L-Drive, a platform connecting learner drivers to cheaper driving lessons.<\/p>\n Two further prizes of \u00a3500 each, were awarded to the best product and best service in the competition. The best service was won by Domenico Martini, who is creating a platform to help provide cover for last-minute gaps in shifts. Best product was won by Lucy Kemsley, and Stanislav Yakimov, who are improving dental brace design.<\/p>\n Students had seven minutes to pitch their businesses before answering questions from the judges who included Daniel Rubin, the founder and executive chairman of global footwear and accessories brand Dune London<\/a>. The businesses were assessed on criteria including innovation and the potential for scale.<\/p>\n Audience members included Kent County Council\u2019s<\/a> David Godfrey and business people from across the county.<\/p>\n The Business Start-Up Journey is a philanthropically funded programme offering support for students who are setting up their own businesses. It offers a combination of practical workshops, one-to-one advice, talks and mentoring.<\/p>\n It is part of the ASPIRE<\/a> (Accelerator Space for Innovation and Responsible Enterprise) project which recently hosted a national student enterprise conference at the Canterbury campus, attracting more than 400 delegates over two days.<\/p>\n For more information on our courses, please visit out Kent Business School Programme pages.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three start-up businesses won funding from a University of Kent programme to support future entrepreneurs. Twelve new businesses, all founded by students at Kent Business … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54944,"featured_media":2827,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[54,151359,169048],"tags":[170949,164121,5349,169090,151477,165985],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14225"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/54944"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14225"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14225\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}