King’s College London Engineers in Business Competition – 2023

King’s College London has a thriving entrepreneurial community and has a dedicated Entrepreneurship Institute which runs an annual Idea Factory competition which encourages students to develop early-stage business ideas. The competition aims to nurture the biggest and best ideas from across the university that have the potential to grow into ventures.

King’s expanded its Idea Factory competition using its EIB prize fund to create its own Engineers in Business competition which ran in tandem with Idea Factory. Participants were supported through a series of workshops and webinars that helped students to learn more about a range of entrepreneurial skills including ideation, validation, disruption and pitching.

Winner: Heard

Rumeesa Rais, MSc MedTech, Innovation & Entrepreneurship – £3,000 Engineers in Business Prize

Rumeesa won her Engineers in Business prize for her innovation, Heard, a wearable language translation device to support healthcare and overcome multilingual communication barriers in a variety of settings. Heard’s focus is to improve the quality of healthcare delivery by combating language barriers.

Rumeesa explained: “International migration has risen over the past 20 years and communities that have English as a second language face lower-quality of healthcare services due to linguistic discordance. Our focus is addressing sustainable development goals (SDGs) of good health and well-being, reducing inequalities, and partnership for the goals. Through using Neural Machine Translation (NMT), a software of two-way seamless translation can occur no matter the language spoken. The future of Heard could look like a smart, wearable device that can be clipped on the ear during patient visits.

Karyn Sansom, NYT Ltd, mentor of the competition winner Heard said: “It was a pleasure working with Rumeesa, and such a wonderful opportunity to observe such a ground-breaking undertaking by Kings College. The opportunity for students to develop their entrepreneurial skills and business acumen while studying engineering is truly amazing. It’ll be great to see adoption across engineering courses across the country if not in place already. I hope King’s College develops this into a yearly event.”

Pictured left to right are finalist Mei Tuson (PhD Student in the Faculty of Natural, Engineering & Mathematical Science) winner Rumessa Rais and the second finalist, Ed James (MSc Robotics).

Positive feedback

The Engineers in Business Competition which ran at King’s College London for the first time in 2023 has been a fabulous opportunity for the engineering students to take their first steps towards entrepreneurship. The additional requirement that we set for their solutions to address one or more of the Sustainable Development Goals added value to the competition for us, as it aligns directly with our teaching values, and in particular our desire to create future environmentally and socially conscious leaders. We have thoroughly enjoyed running this excellent competition and are grateful for the Engineers in Business Fellowship for providing the support and funding.

Dawn Bonfield MBE FREng
Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence
King’s College London

I am delighted about the EIBC Competition as it encourages engineers to be entrepreneurial and think about visionary ways in which engineering technologies can improve our lives. I would like to thank the Department of Engineering and, in particular, our Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence, Dawn Bonfield MBE, without whom this competition would not have taken place.

Luca Vigano
Vice Dean (Enterprise & Engagement) of the Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences
King’s College London