May 24, 2022, by aczjb1

Responding to real-world challenges: MSc students complete Entrepreneurship Project

Every year in the spring semester, our MSc Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Management students take part in a group project, working alongside a local business or social enterprise.

It’s important for a budding entrepreneur to be able to respond quickly and appropriately to challenges that arise in a business, and the Entrepreneurship Project is a perfect opportunity to nurture that skill.

MSc students Syed Gohar and Ananya Chalermbongkot have been working with the local branch of a national charity called Change Grow Live to develop a sustainable marketing strategy that will help the organisation to recruit volunteers.

Syed (left) and Ananya (2nd right) with Poonyawee (right) and Change Grow Live’s Michelle Brown

Change Grow Live is a health and social care charity, helping people with challenges including drug and alcohol abuse, housing, justice and health and wellbeing.

With each member of the group having worked for a large multinational corporation in their home countries, working with a social enterprise was a new challenge.

“I’ve never worked with a social entrepreneurship before, so to me this was all new – I worked as a financial analyst at Exxon-Mobil in Thailand, so have always worked with a big budget,” explained Ananya. “The key thing I’ve learned is how to try to come up with a strategy taking resource constraints into account. It’s been interesting to learn how people can make things work without having the human and financial resources.”

“That’s how it is for entrepreneurs in the beginning,” added Syed. “You don’t have the luxury of an enormous budget – so it’s really about how do you think about the most viable and feasible solution with limited resources that you have.

“This was a big challenge for us because all of us came from big organisations. So turning a plan around, having in mind those limitations, those resources constraints, was a big challenge, and I think we can be quite proud ourselves having come so far with it.”

Shrinidhi (2nd right) with her group mates Paula (left) and Ikhwan (right) and Sue Carr of V Formation

Shrinidhi Shetty’s group had the opportunity to work with V Formation Ltd, a marketing and PR agency based at BioCity in Nottingham. V Formation work with leading-edge scientists and entrepreneurial business owners to develop and implement marketing and business development strategies.

Shirindi reflected that the project was an excellent opportunity to bring together the theory and practice of entrepreneurship learned during the course so far.

“Last semester we took the Entrepreneurial Creativity module, which was very theoretical,” said Shrinidhi. “Luckily V Formation are very concerned with creative culture, so we were able to pull on our theoretical learnings and reflect on this.”

“We loved taking on the challenges posed by this company – any module where you can learn it practically, you grasp more of the knowledge.”

“We got a really good organisation to work with, so warm and welcoming, treating us like members of the team, it’s like we were part of the family which we really enjoyed.”

“Students from all over the world apply to the MSc in Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management because they are keen on developing the hands-on experience that the Entrepreneurship Project Module provides,” said course convenors Jose Francisco Gonzalez and Claire Donaldson. “It has been very fulfilling to see highly motivated students rising to the challenge of supporting local organisations through deploying the entrepreneurial knowledge, skills and experience they acquired during their programme.”

The Haydn Green Institute would like to thank all our project sponsor organisations and consultants for their help throughout the semester – it would be impossible to deliver offering this unique opportunity for our students to work directly with an external organisation on a real-world project brief without their help.

Our project sponsors organisations are:

Find out more about postgraduate study at HGI here

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