Support for budding entrepreneurs 

If you're considering a future as an entrepreneur, starting up a new business, or you're a budding innovator aiming to join an existing one, you’ll have every opportunity to develop the knowledge, skills and experience you need to bring your ideas to life.

We have a dedicated Enterprise team who can help you find your way around the College’s network of programmes, facilities and initiatives, including:

• the WE Innovate @ Imperial programme, designed to encourage female students with an enterprising idea through a series of exclusive development and mentoring opportunities, and offering the chance to win £10,000 in funding
• The Enterprise Lab, which ensures that all students who have an idea or innovation receive the support they need to take it forward, regardless of what stage they’re at. That might be through training programmes, access to competitions for funding, ideas surgeries with the Lab team or mentoring from industry experts. There is also the physical space itself, which has become a go-to place for people to work on their ideas, connect with others and get inspiration.
• Imperial College Advanced Hackspace, which brings together a network of facilities at our South Kensington and White City Campuses where you can build things, fix things and learn to hack (the good kind).
• The Invention Rooms at our White City Campus, a brand new space offering access to workshop technologies and specialist prototyping and manufacturing equipment

Competitions 

We run a series of competitions across the College, where students can win prize money to help fund their ideas, including Dragon’s Den style competitions and the annual Venture Catalyst Challenge, which helps new inventors take their ideas beyond the planning stage.

Enterprising societies

You can tell how active our student entrepreneurs are by the number of enterprising student-run societies at Imperial, including:

• Imperial Entrepreneurs, the launchpad for the next generation of technology entrepreneurs at Imperial;
• the Imperial App Society, which inspires students to share ideas and transform their environment by developing mobile apps;
• E.quinox, a humanitarian organisation working to bring cost-effective and renewable energy to developing countries; and
• Enactus, which is committed to using the power of entrepreneurial action to improve the lives of people in need and runs a wide variety of social enterprise projects that span the globe

Visit our Enterprise portal to find out more about the range of activities, competitions and events for you to get involved with.