Winners 2023
Engineers in Business Competition – Champion of Champions Grand Final 2023
The fifth Engineers in Business Champion of Champions Grand Final took place at the Royal Academy of Engineering on 3 November 2023.
Ten university teams comprising engineering students and graduates pitched their ideas and innovations to win a share of the £16,000 prize pot, mentoring from Sainsbury Management Fellows and prizes from our sponsors, PurpleCV and Cambridge University Press.
The background
The Grand Final was the culmination of a series of enterprise competitions held at universities across the UK, encouraging students to bring together the two disciplines of engineering and business. This year, we received a record number of entries, with our shortlisting panel finding it very difficult to whittle the innovative ideas down to the final ten.
After participating in a Coaching and Publicity Day where our finalists received mentoring and opportunities to hone their pitch ready for the big day, they took to the stage alongside TV presenter and engineer Rob Bell, who guided contestants through the spotlight of the show.
The finalists competed in two categories – Big Ideas and Startup, with chances to win a series of prizes totalling £16,000. Each of the finalists had just three minutes to pitch their ideas and then had to answer questions from our judging panel. After a nail-biting wait for the results, the winners were revealed.
The Winners
The Enterprise Award of £5,000 and the Startup main prize of £3,000 plus mentoring was won by Pipeline Organics from the University of Nottingham. Pipeline Organics is an early stage cleantech startup which is creating TankArc – an innovative piece of technology that generates renewable electricity from wastewater.
The main Big Ideas prize of £3,000 plus mentoring was won by Meta Futura Aerospace from the University of Southampton, which also picked up the in-show Audience Prize of £500. Their MetaFlex innovation is a ground-breaking attitude and orbit control system designed for space organisations, satellite operators and research institutions.
The Startup runner-up prize of £1,500 was won by Global Anthem from York St John University for its innovative communication tool which could prove useful during humanitarian crises.
The Big Ideas runner-up prize of £1,500 was won by Squaser from Lancaster University for its laser line detection system which could revolutionise the sport of squash.
The Best Presentation prize of £1,000 – sponsored by PurpleCV – was won by PCOSENS from Imperial College London for their invention of a wearable sensor to track female hormones relating to Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.
The pre-show Public Vote prize of £500 was won by Dot Stores from the University of Birmingham for their idea to transform retail through robotics.
The Winning Innovations
The judges
SMF Andrew Doe, Entrepreneur and Non-Executive Director
SMF Andrew de Rozairo, Sustainability Director, EMEA at Microsoft
Caroline Fleming, Director of Surrey Innovation District at University of Surrey
Megan Powell Vreeswijk, Head of Enterprise and Innovation at Nottingham Trent University
Thank you to our sponsors
Our thanks and appreciation must go to our long-standing prize sponsors. As well as providing a £1,000 prize for Best Presentation, PurpleCV provided personal CV packages to all participants in each winning team and CUP (Cambridge University Press) provided Digital Innovation and Entrepreneurship books to each winning team. Each winning team also won a copy of the book, Double Your Price, by EIBF President David Falzani MBE.