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Entrepreneurship at London Business School
Entrepreneurship is one of the fastest growing, most in-demand and dominating concentrations in MBA programs. London Business School, for one, has prepared entrepreneurs for decades, providing a wide pool of alumni and experience. In today’s age of global marketing and continuous development, the School has created a broad array of resources available to students and future entrepreneurs. The segments below highlight some of the key programs offered at London Business School:
The Incubators
Incubators have gained popularity throughout the years at business schools around the globe. London Business School (LBS) recently began providing incubators to recently graduated entrepreneurial MBAs to support promising LBS alumni. Run by the LBS career services center and the Deloitte Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, these LBS incubators take entrepreneurs whose business ideas show the most potential for development and afford them the opportunity to live on campus for twelve months after their MBA graduation in order to better form their business before being released from the incubator. This opportunity allows them usage of campus facilities, resources, technology, and faculty to grow and empower their start-up businesses. The hope is that living in the incubator with a community of creative and driven like-minded entrepreneurs will fuel originality, intellectuality, and aggressive commitment to developing business. In exchange, incubator residents are expected to give back to the LBS student community by speaking to MBAs with an entrepreneurial focus on the challenges and experiences faced by starting business owners.
Competitions and Contests
LBS has teamed with University College London (UCL) and other universities world-wide to challenge LBS MBAs to compete for prizes, prestige, and pride. Competitions include The European Business Plan of the Year Competition, The Venture Capital Investment Competition, the Global Social Ventures Competition, and the CleanTech Challenge. Each of the competitions brings together the best of the best to share, compare, and compete.
The CleanTech Challenge, for instance, is divided into three phases. Stage I, the development of initial ideas, allows all potential challengers to present ideas to judges in written summary to gain passage to Stage II. In the idea formation and team initiation stage, students must form teams and understand the economic viability and originality of their project to progress to Stage III. Finally, Stage III brings together the top ten competitors into a two-day boot camp at LBS. Judges ultimately assess originality, environmental impact, and award £10,000.
In another competition of enterprise run by the Deloitte Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Founder Awards, seven auspicious graduate businesses are presented with a prize package for their ideas, consisting of a year-long housing contract in the LBS incubator, mentoring from Deloitte and London Business School faculty and alumni, access to on-campus training sessions, a one-on-one discussion with brand consultants, Landor Associates, and a small cash award.
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) is a research initiative started in 1999 between LBS and Babson College. Each year, GEM assesses the entrepreneurial startups in various countries to mark the rate of economic growth and the effects of entrepreneurship on the overall economy. Small groups form “National Teams” and are designated to collect data and create an assessment of its assigned country over the year to ultimately construct a “National Findings Report”. The first study in 1999 analyzed ten countries; today, GEM has analyzed more than 85 countries and is the largest ongoing entrepreneurial research initiative in existence.
Higher Education London Outreach
The Higher Education London Outreach (HELO) is a project headed by UCL and backed by LBS, focused on bridging the divide between small- and medium-sized businesses in London. Oftentimes, growing London businesses have difficulty in gaining access to the vast array of resources that LBS and UCL have to offer. To hamper the problem, HELO pulls together teams of four to six students from UCL and LBS, each of diverse academic backgrounds and experiences, to help connect these businesses to expertise and support through short-term consulting. To date, HELO has helped over 180 London businesses with business plans, marketing strategies, prototyping, research, and designs.
TELL Series
Started in 2009, the TELL series brings entrepreneurial leaders to LBS to speak on their entrepreneurial experiences, challenges, and up-and-coming issues, and connects students with experienced European business owners. Since its first speaker in 2009, the TELL series has hosted over 30 of Europe’s top business leaders. Speakers have included well-known and rising leaders such as: Andrew Sukawaty, former CEO and President Sprint PCS; John McCall MacBain, founder, former President and CEO Trader Classified Media; David Soskin, Co-Founder of Howzat Media and Non-Exec Director of Cheapflights.com; and Hermann Hauser, founder and Managing Director of Amadeus Capital. Last year, LBS hosted 14 events alone, with over 1,500 people attending, and the number of speakers is expected to exceed the previous numbers.