A team of students at the University of Dundee will receive the first Scottish entrepreneurial scholarship for undergraduates tomorrow clinching £1,300 worth of funding and prize money to take their innovative idea to the next stage and hopefully into business.
Dynamo computing solutions - a team of three final year Applied Computing students - Stuart Anderson, Brian McNicoll and Stuart Reid provide software development, web management tools and wireless software. They will be given office space, for 4 months at the University's Springfield Incubator Unit where they will benefit from continuous one to one business development support from professionals to commercialise their IT solutions.
Ten prize winners will also receive cash awards for their innovative ideas in the University's Serious Business competition. The top award of £400 will go to BIND for a customisable sketchbook for artists that allows a variety of different papers and mediums to be bound within it and tailored to suit the customer.
A team who have developed colourful woolly hats for kids with glow in the dark fibres will receive a runners up prize of £150 to take their idea forward. (All projects and prizes listed below.) The prizes will be presented by Professor Malcolm Horner, Deputy Principal and Director of the Centre for Enterprise Management.
The competition was established by the University of Dundee for its burgeonging population of students who are seeking to commercialise their bright ideas. John Mackenzie, Commercialisation Facilitator, at the University's Research and Innovation Services expressed his delight at the quantity but in particular the quality of response from students: "Judges had to deliberate long and hard and decided to award 10 cash prizes totalling £2,200 which will go directly into the pockets of these enterprising students.
This is the first year of this competition and we have big plans and high hopes that it will become a flagship event at the University of Dundee. It confirms that the University of Dundee is becoming more and more an entrepreneurial and attractive place for students to study, research and do business.
The Centre for Enterprise Management, part of the Scottish Institute for Enterprise, who run the competition, is very grateful to Scottish Enterprise Tayside for its sponsorship of this event and equally grateful to its partners in the competition, the Young Entrepreneurs Society, who in its second year have been promoting the competition to its members.
By Jenny Marra, Head of Press 01382 344910 j.m.marra@dundee.ac.uk