BUSI60042 Entrepreneurship Online – 2023
Back to CompetitionsImperial College Business School’s Entrepreneurship Online (BUSI60042) allows students to design a business based on gaps they saw in the market and issues relevant to their communities. Students were required to develop a pitch deck and videotape showing how they pitched the business, as well as test critical hypotheses of their business through a set of experiences that they detailed in a final playbook. |
First Prize Winner: OATOMAT
The OATOMAT team was awarded a £1,000 Engineers in Business Prize. The team are pictured top row, left to right Jasmine Chung (Chemistry), Faris Al-Kayssi (Electrical and Electronic Engineering), Navathorn Chittkusol (Mechanical Engineering); bottom row left to right, Yi Ting Char (Mechanical Engineering), Steven Dilmann (Aeronautics with Spacecraft Engineering) and Victoria Chung (Chemistry).
The students developed a business idea that looked at tackling the negative impacts on people’s health by skipping breakfast. OATOMAT will help students and working professionals solve this issue by providing quick, affordable, healthy, customisable to-go oatmeals through an automated machine placed at train stations, university campuses and offices.
These competitive advantages will help us compete with existing solutions, including oatmeals by chain cafés such as Pret A Manger or instant oatmeal cups by Quaker.
Second Prize Winner: CheckEng
The CheckEng was awarded a £500 Engineers in Business prize. The team members pictured top row, left to right are Alex Christopherson (Mechanical Engineering), Zhaoyu Wu (Electrical and Electronic Engineering); bottom left to right, Yinghao Wang (Mechanical Engineering) and Cesar Dori (Mechanical Engineering). The fifth team member, Filip Szczebak (Mechanical Engineering) is not pictured.
CheckEng is a website that checks engineering drawings for errors, missing information and standard compliance, and pairs designs with potential manufacturers. The motivation is driven by their experience of struggling to make engineering drawings comprehensive, but also from experience within industry where drawings have not been checked, leading to issues in product development and delivery.
Initially, only an upload-to-check feature will be developed. In the future, a real-time plugin for CAD packages will be developed to allow checks while the drawing is being produced (speeding up the process further). Different versions of the service are to be created: a ‘freemium’ online-only version for individuals and both an online-only and offline version for industry.
Third Prize Winner: NewNews
The NewNews team was awarded a £500 Engineers in Business Prize. The team members are pictured top row left to right, Sipan Petrosyan (Computing), Flora Wu (Computing), Liangxun Tan (Biotechnology), bottom row left to right Zach Potel (Mathematics). Don-Angelo Sfeir (Physics with theoretical physics) and Dilong Zhang (Mathematics).
The NewNews app ensures that even without the Internet, users can get access to the most recent news through their mobile devices. They are able to do this by creating a safe and secure Bluetooth mesh network.
A user with access to the internet downloads the latest news and then enters an area without network (eg London tube) and is automatically connected to the Bluetooth mesh network; the news they downloaded then becomes readily available to all users who are connected to the same network. This flow of news continues as new users join the network and spread the most updated data, thus the latest news.
Positive feedback
The EBIF prize is a great opportunity for students to develop their ideas further and, in the process, enhance their skills that I am sure will be of great value for their future career trajectory. It also elicits a more competitive nature from students, prompting them to consider their ideas more wholistically and with greater detail, as their ideas are no longer just for university marks.
Tim Wiess
BUSI60042 Entrepreneurship Online Module Leader
Imperial College Business School