Innovation, impact and interdisciplinarian thinking: Enterprise news in brief

There have been some high-profile success stories from the College community this month, including from Imperial’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Impact at a distance: Report makes for great reading 

Delivering impact is our maxim here at the College, and we see examples across the community every day. Earlier this month, the Enterprise Lab published their review of the pandemic-affected 2020-2021 academic year, and the results are staggering. 

Despite the impact of COVID on reducing access to services and in-person activities, over 2,500 students still participated in programmes or events led by the team, with 51 new startups founded from the community. Find out more in the Enterprise Lab Impact Report. 

Entrepreneurship breeds interdisciplinarian thinking: Here’s the proof 

We practice what we preach in the Enterprise Division, making sure that we cross-pollinate the different expertise from across the College in order for businesses and organisations to reach the goals and tackle the causes, rather than the symptoms, of the challenges they face. 

And as well as having technologists, scientists, engineers, medics and mathematicians, we have experts in the very nature of entrepreneurialism, innovation and discovery too. Professor Markus Perkmann, from Imperial College Business School, academic director of the Enterprise Lab, alongside colleagues Jan-Michael Ross and Riccardo Fini recently produced a report exploring how entrepreneurship breeds interdisciplinarian thinking, making farther-reaching and more long-lived interventions for business success. 

30 Under 30 and Mayor’s Entrepreneurs: Imperial’s innovators at it again 

Forbes’s annual celebration of the brightest and most exciting young minds has regularly featured founders and innovators from the Imperial community, and once again the College’s young entrepreneurs have made a mark. 

The European cohort in 2022 include Aaron Koshy of Planera, Finlay Duncan, Julian Ellis-Brown and Neloufar Taheri (SaltyCo) and Lorenzo Sani and Alex Zhou (Shopscribe).  

Having previously reported that 38 of the 150 semi-finalists in the 2022 Mayor of London’s Mayor’s Entrepreneurs were from the College, we’re delighted to announce that nine of the 25 finalists are from the Imperial community. Good luck to the finalists, who are following in a tradition of successful startups and founders to have taken top honours in previous years. 

Better by design: Innovative companies to help save the planet 

Announced at COP26 by HRH Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, the Terra Carta – a charter to save the earth – is aimed at inspiring the innovation needed to mitigate the impact of climate change and to create sustainable futures for societies around the world. 

Two companies from Imperial and the RCA – The Tyre Collective and AMPHIBIO – have been selected to work directly with the Prince and principal designer Sir Jony Ive (you may remember him from designing most of Apple’s breakthrough products over the past 25 years). Check out more in this article in the FT.  

Another royal-backed initiative – the Earthshot Prize – could have a winner from the College this year, too. Ecofye has been nominated by the Web Summit for the 2022 prize, which was set up in 2020 by Prince William and Sir David Attenborough, with their sustainability analytics and insights tool aiming to bring home one of the five £1 million prizes later this year. 

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