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Starting a Business Module – 2023

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The University of Warwick’s Starting a Business module examines how businesses are established. The module gives second-year Engineering Undergraduates the opportunity to understand and appreciate the challenges involved in setting up their own business. The module takes a hands-on approach in teaching students how to think and act like an entrepreneur, covering areas such as developing and testing a business idea, pitching the concept to industry experts and writing a business report based on feedback and insights.

Joint First Prize Winner: Mystery Threads

The Mystery Threads team comprises (back row, left to right) Natasha Peacock, General Engineering; Bariah Azhar; Civil Engineering; Joseph Ali, Civil Engineering; Will Powell, Mechanical Engineering (front row left to right); Ruiyang Zhang, Civil Engineering and Saqib Ahmed, Systems Engineering.  The team was awarded a £1,500 Engineers in Business prize for its innovation.

Fast fashion is a major blight on the environment. It’s defined as ‘A design, manufacturing, and marketing method focused on rapidly producing high volumes of clothing.’ (Stanton, 2023). It allows mass-produced clothing to reflect changing fashion whilst maintaining affordability. This process, however, has horrific consequences, including poor working conditions, water wastage and excessive waste of clothing due to inferior quality and changing fashion trends (Everyday Recycler, 2023).

Mystery Threads provides a fresh take on second-hand clothing. Rather than spending hours sifting through charity shops and websites, customers can buy one of Mystery Threads’ boxes, which contain a random selection of second-hand street fashion clothing. The clothing will be sourced from charity shops, online second-hand clothing shops, and wholesale from clothing companies. Through the company’s website, customers can buy Bronze, Silver, or Gold boxes, select their size, and enjoy the anticipation of discovering what might arrive. The concept of mystery box-style shopping, where you don’t know exactly what you’re getting, can reduce the stress of trying to find products, whilst giving customers the opportunity to experiment with new styles.

Joint First Prize Winner: NightGuide

The NightGuide team comprises (top left to right) Chris Taylor, Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Tobias Rouffaert, Electrical Engineering; Zaki Ibrahim Johare, Systems Engineering; (bottom left to right) Kai Patel, Mechanical Engineering; Brandon Hong, Computer Systems Engineering and Hushrav Buhariwalla, Automotive Engineering.  The team was awarded a £1,500 Engineers in Business prize.

In a 2022 survey of 2,400 university students by the Yorkshire Times, students listed the following as major ingredients in having a safe night out: 40.5% believed leaving with friends to be a huge factor and 15.6% believed not drinking too much also helped. It was clear that safety concerns were prevalent among students, with other accessory features, such as entertainment and socialisation, also playing a part in how enjoyable their nights were. NightGuide is an app-based solution designed to keep users safe and enhance their clubbing experience.

NightGuide has built-in core safety features, the first of them being an emergency SOS widget which is accessible directly from a lock screen, allowing users to trigger it quickly in times of emergency, alerting marked contacts. The app also boasts a proximity messaging feature allowing you to chat with other app users within a 50m radius through a mesh network between mobile phones rather than cell towers, thus requiring no phone signal. NightGuide also comes equipped with well-being features such as a drink counter and alert system to ensure the user does not exceed limits, in addition to a location tracker that allows users to know where their friends are.