Entrepreneurship plays a vital role in the commercialisation of technological and scientific innovation, and reducing the entrepreneurial gap between the UK and US is critical to boosting productivity. Research suggests that the UK would have 1.8m more people starting up or running new businesses, if levels of entrepreneurial activity matched those in the US.

The Cambridge-MIT Institute has founded, funded and supported initiatives that are fostering a vibrant enterprise culture within the UK’s universities. From sponsoring the most successful student-led enterprise society in the UK, and designing a unique course to help mid-career women to start their own technology company, the Cambridge-MIT Institute has helped universities capitalise on their most enterprising asset - the people who work and study there.

Encouraging Students to Start-Up

The Cambridge University Technology and Enterprise Club, otherwise known as CUTEC, was founded with our sponsorship three years ago. This student-led society is devoted to effecting entrepreneurial culture change within the university. Its annual venture capital conference has promoted the transformative power of entrepreneurship, and made important connections between the investment community and Cambridge University.

CUTEC has now become a key supporter of our newest enterprise initiative: i-Teams, a hands-on entrepreneurial education programme for post-graduates. Students are placed in teams of five and given 6 weeks to investigate go-to-market strategies for real research projects. The results so far have been astonishing, with i-Teams students producing highly valuable consultancy for three research projects currently funded by the Cambridge-MIT Institute. Next term, i-Teams will branch out to include research projects outside the Cambridge-MIT portfolio, and we have great hopes that this initiative – which delivers real benefits to both the students and the research projects they work on - will become an integral part of the university’s strategy for commercialising research.

While CUTEC and i-Teams are creating a vibrant culture of enterprise within the university and teaching students the skills they need to successfully commercialise research, another organisation funded and supported by the Cambridge-MIT Institute is helping students and faculty take an innovative idea and turn it into a real company. Cambridge University Entrepreneurs is the UK’s most successful student-led enterprise society, having distributed more than £250,000 through its business creation competition and launched 26 start-ups. 19 of those companies are still active, and their estimated worth exceeds £20,000,000.

Sharing the Keys to Success

Since we launched Enterprisers - a one week intensive enterprise workshop for undergraduates – the course has run 10 times at universities across the UK. Over the last four years, Enterprisers has delivered a total of 28,252 hours of entrepreneurial learning to 559 students from 53 different universities in the UK, Europe and US. To date, over thirty Enterprisers Alumni have gone on to launch their own company, and the course has become a test case for our research into the impact of enterprise training on the confidence levels of students.

In addition to studying the impact of Enterprisers, we are also working to identify which aspects of education best enable students to be productive and innovative when they leave education and enter the workplace. Our Education for High Growth Innovation programme – or EHGI for short – is developing the tools to assess different kinds of educational experiences and their outcomes, and is sharing those tools with a wide consortium of UK and US universities.

Opening Doors for Female Entrepreneurs

Recent research suggests that if women started businesses at the same rate as men, the UK would have 150,000 additional start-ups each year. This inequality in entrepreneurship is even greater in the field of Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) – a factor that may be holding back the UK economy. MEETS was designed by the Cambridge-MIT Institute to deliver bespoke enterprise education to mid-career women. The course is unique in being targeted solely at female professionals working in SET, and there is potential to roll MEETS out to other universities across the UK and US.

Networks play a vital role in facilitating entrepreneurship, so the Cambridge-MIT Institute has worked closely with the East of England Development Agency and Cambridgeshire County Council to found the UK’s first Women in Technology Community (WiTC). The WiTC takes as its role model the highly successful Women’s Technology Cluster in San Francisco, which has helped launch over 400 female-led start-ups since its foundation in 1998, creating 4,000 jobs and raising $1.5 billion in venture capital. It is still early days for the Cambridge Community, but the organisers hope that this new network will provide enterprising women working in the Cambridge Cluster and the surrounding region with the access to funding, training and services they need to succeed, thereby attracting more female-led companies to locate in the East of England.