Henley mentored team wins YES prize
After last year’s success in winning the Your Entrepreneurship Scheme (YES) competition, we have again reached the final with our fantastic team TropiCultivar. They are a cross school team made up of participants from the School of Biological Sciences, School of Pharmacy and School and Agriculture, Policy, and Development. Read a report from the Henley Enterprise Lab below.
From the depths of research, it can sometimes be hard to see the opportunities of the world outside academia or how research can make a real-world difference. Each year the Knowledge Transfer Centre at the University of Reading supports the Your Entrepreneur Scheme (YES) which gives early career researchers (ECRs), postgraduate, postdoctoral students and technicians the opportunity to see their worlds a little differently, explore the entrepreneurial mindset and unleash their ingenuity.
Teams come together to develop a business plan for a start-up company based on a hypothetical but plausible idea that attempts to deploy novel science and engineering to address societal challenges.
After last year’s success in winning the competition, we have again reached the final with our fantastic team TropiCultivar. TropiCultivar are a cross school team made up of participants from the School of Biological Sciences, School of Pharmacy and School and Agriculture, Policy, and Development.
TropiCultivar have not only reached the final, which was hosted at the Royal Society, but were awarded The Syngenta Sustainable Agriculture Prize which is a tremendous achievement. TropiCultivar’s hypothetical business idea, is a vertical farming system for tropical fruits. Their business model would reduce food waste, food miles and improve the quality and availability of tropical fruits in the UK and Europe. Iris Kabelo who is a member of team Tropicultivar has said of her YES journey ‘I have learnt that it is OK to be an academic and then also turn to business’.
Our teams were mentored by entrepreneurs at Henley Business School including Jurek Sikorski, Dr William Kilgallon, and local entrepreneur Gordon McAlpine.
