London universities join together for unique collaboration

9 London university enterprise teams have joined together for the first ‘London Venture Crawl’ – an event they hope to be the first of many such collaborations. Brunel University, Birkbeck University of London, King’s College London, London College of Fashion, Loughborough University London, London South Bank University, UCL, University of East London and the University of Westminster, hired 6 London routemasters to take 250 students on a unique 12 hour entrepreneurial journey across London. Students studying subjects as diverse as fashion, computer science, medicine and law stopped off for talks, workshops and bespoke tours at innovation spaces and organisations including Amazon Fashion, Hello Fresh, Deliveroo, Barclays, Innovation Warehouse, Digital Catapult, Makerversity, Wayra and Campus London – A Google space. The event was featured in Times Higher

Simply Do Ideas: £550,000 investment raised

Simply Do Ideas, the education technology company that helps people build and test their ideas, has raised £550,000 in its latest funding round. Simply Do Ideas was founded in 2015 by Lee Sharma, former enterprise educator in both FE and HE. This was after seeing the frustrations that start-ups and existing organisations faced in taking a raw idea through to execution. The company has since developed cloud-based, B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) and BPaaS (Business Process as a Service) platforms. Their products have been featured as best practice by the likes of the Huffington Post, Forbes and Business Insider. Full story here.

Oxford Brookes: Global Social Entrepreneurship forum

Last week, the Global Social Entrepreneurship Network (GSEN) European Regional Conference took place at Oxford Brookes University and saw a gathering of social entrepreneurship supporters and education providers from across the continent. The conference celebrated the successes of GSEN, shared talent, knowledge and ideas and seeded support for individual social entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurship communities. Jeff Willmore, Social Entrepreneurship Consultant for the University said: “Being a founder member of GSEN helps place Oxford Brookes at the heart of social entrepreneurship support globally. GSEN members look to support those courageous people who set out to make a change to the world’s toughest problems.”. Full story here.

SETsquared, Warwick and Queen’s: roll-out of ICURe

Innovation to Commercialisation of University Research (ICURe) conceived and managed by the SETsquared partnership aims to increase the academic research commercialisation pipeline. To date ICURe has worked with 28 HEIs, 318 academic staff and 98 TTOs. ICURe supports three-months full-time, intense market validation with Early Career Researchers (ECRs) tasked to have 100 meaningful conversations with customers, regulators, suppliers, partners and competitors to validate the commercial potential of their research. The programme funds up-to £35k for the ECR’s salary and travel/subsistence costs. So far 44 companies have been created and £33.5m raised. Innovate UK have announced a further £8m investment in ICURe and the University of Warwick and Queen’s University Belfast will work alongside SETsquared to roll it out. Full story here.