Ingenuity National Competition – 2023

Run by the University of Nottingham and in partnership with Nuffield Health, the Ingenuity Programme provides start-up skills and training, networking, mentoring, and routes to funding for early-stage impact-driven businesses to make social and environmental change. The programme supports participants in turning ideas for change into exciting new ventures and adopts an agile and flexible approach to ensure we are diverse, inclusive and accessible. Ingenuity is open to all.

Entrepreneur of the Year: Richard Holmes - Global-Anthem

The £1,000 Engineers in Business prize was awarded to Richard Holmes (BA Product Design), founder of Global-Anthem and innovator of Building Stronger Communities. Richard was presented with his award by Simon Mosey, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Chair of Your Entrepreneurs Scheme and Ingenuity Programme.

Global-Anthem is an impact-driven business that tackles the traumatic and educationally disruptive uprooting of refugees, migrants and asylum seekers and the unmet basic need to communicate across multiple languages, countries and boundaries at both a humanitarian and official level.

Global-Anthem offers an alternative and augmentative communication system developed to bridge this gap utilising natural and intuitive hand gestures and the development of easy-to-use flashcards with a non-specific gender and race illustration that can be used across any language or culture. It unites speakers of several languages, through one universal communication system, and fosters togetherness and community.

Commenting on his award Richard said: “I’m just absolutely shell shocked. I really didn’t expect it. I’m unbelievably proud and grateful. I had no business background coming into the Ingenuity Programme and no experience when it comes to IP, business plans, financial forecasts, or professional pitching. The mentoring, the support, the whole programme has really taken me from, genuinely a really rough working idea, into a real, viable business that can be delivered. The funding is going to make it real, you know, the packs are going to go out – I had one goal and that was to get the Global Anthem packs into the hands of support workers, free of charge. That’s going to happen now!”

The Background:
Richard Holmes has been working with Professor Inna Birillo of the Kyiv National University of Culture and Arts on a project to give displaced people, who arrive in foreign locations with little or no resources, a simplified communication system. The system uses intuitive hand gestures to convey universally recognised phrases that articulate basic human needs related to food, health, and general welfare. KNUKIM has visited York St John several times to supervise and guide the project. Their input has ensured that aspects of the project have been bespoke from a Ukrainian perspective. Whilst working with displaced refugees as a support worker with Refugee Action-York, Richard saw first-hand the difficulties displaced people face in communicating with support services. His project initially involved working with all language groups and nationalities. Professor Birillo tasked Richard to adapt his Global-Anthem project to suit the current and acute Ukrainian refugee crisis and provided guidance and creative oversight on implementing the adapted system.

Positive feedback

The EIB Prize Fund focuses participants’ attention on creating and measuring impact in the world. It validates less obvious courses as creating engineers for the future; engineers used in the broader sense of being designers, planners, architects, producers or operators. In this case, Richard has engineered a solution to a problem, drawing on innovation skills from his Product Design course.

Richard Jones
Student Success Adviser (Careers) | Student Success and Employability
York St John University