A supportive environment

In recent times Laurence mentored EJ Roodt, who set up the Epowar women’s safety app. Roodt credits him with much of her success in progressing through the Dragons’ Den rounds to secure development funding.

“I had loads of support from the University, I got involved with Enterprise and was paired up with Laurence, who has been incredibly invaluable. There were lots of competitions to get funding, and lots of opportunities to learn about the entrepreneurial journey through events and talks,” EJ says.

The University of Bath also offers some students the possibility to devote a placement year, which is usually spent with companies or other organisations, to building up with own business – if their business idea is considered to be sufficiently robust, such as Izzie Hurst’s Dopplle clothes swap app, which provides people with a platform to exchange clothes.

“This option is undoubtedly attractive to many student entrepreneurs and it has worked well for many but it is not a step to be taken lightly. Many may well benefit more from gaining experience in industry, which might help them down the line in developing their own business. So this has to be assessed carefully in terms of what will be of most benefit to the budding entrepreneur. But the option is there if a strong enough case can be made,” Siobain Hone says.

Izzie Hurst and EJ Roodt both then progressed further along the Student Enterprise Journey to win more funding - £15,000 each - from a University Innovation Award. Fellow award winner and mechanical engineering student James Russ hailed the prize as key to his success in creating the Testmyteeth app.

“I joined the Entrepreneurs Society and Entrepreneurship Programme and that provided the Accelerate programme, which was fantastic. We got some grant funding through that in the early days. And then the Dragons’ Den, rounds one and two, which we secured giving us several thousands of pounds to start the development of Testmyteeth into our mobile app. And finally we were supported by the £15,000 Innovation Award, which was a game changer, really. That’s allowed me to work full-time, building the business,” James says.

A further stepping stone to business success is the three-day start-up programme run by SETsquared, the award-winning global business incubator and accelerator partnership between the Universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton, and Surrey.

This weekend event offered PhD student Helen Liang the chance to tackle the issue of waste from scientific labs. Liang met her co-founders at the event in 2019 and went on to set up her own company, LabCycle, to tackle the problem. Her vision is to recycle at least 40%, or around 60,000 tonnes, of single-use lab plastic waste per year and turn it back into new lab equipment, creating a circular economy and making a huge impact on the amount of plastic waste thrown away by the scientific and biomedical sectors.