Sainsbury Management Fellows (SMF), the charity that awards MBA scholarships to engineers, is collaborating with Nottingham University Business School (NUBS) on an Entrepreneurship & Business (E&B) Poster Competition.
The SMF E&B Poster Competition prize will be awarded to the team that develops the most innovative business idea that addresses a need in society, demonstrates clear benefits to the target audience and incorporates engineering thinking within the concept.
A pilot, the SMF E&B Poster Competition is open to all business and engineering students taking the Entrepreneurship & Business Module, and competing teams must include at least one engineering undergraduate.
David Falzani, President of SMF explained: “We want to encourage and inspire young engineers to get more involved in business innovation; engineering skills are perfectly suited to the creation and development of new business ideas.
“Up to 120 teams will be presenting their E&B Posters at NUBS in December and for this pilot year we anticipate 30 of those teams competing for the SMF prize. These students will first give their poster presentation for their degree assessment in the usual way and a week later will re-pitch their presentation to the SMF judging panel”.
The winning team will receive the following prize from SMF:
- Career and business development mentoring
- Access to SMF networking events which are attended by entrepreneurs and business leaders from major UK companies
- £1,000 team prize
Chris Mahon, Deputy Director of MBA Programmes at NUBS, and module convenor of E&B, sees great potential in this new collaboration: “We are thrilled to be working with Sainsbury Management Fellows this year, and early evidence suggests there will be strong interest in this new competition. For us, encouraging engineering students to participate in entrepreneurship education makes sense in two ways. First, young aspiring engineers will clearly benefit from developing their entrepreneurial skill set. As David has said, this is a clear win. But our Business School students will also gain from working with the young engineers, and from a meaningful cross pollination across schools and programmes.”
SMF and Nottingham University Business School intend to run the SMF E&B Poster Competition annually, after reviewing the results of the pilot. In addition, SMF has a long term goal of partnering with other business schools to sponsor initiatives that spark engineers’ interest in business and entrepreneurship.
