Innovation Driven Enterprise Academy

Innovation Driven Enterprise Academy (IDEA) is an extra-curricular summer camp offering talented early-stage students the opportunity to work across engineering and business disciplines to develop business ideas.

It aims to nurture a talent pipeline for fast scaling, sustainable startups and to enhance graduate employability by:

  • Shifting mindsets among top students so they connect the dots between innovation and business entrepreneurship
  • Developing entrepreneurial skills through trial and error iterations
  • Fostering experiential learning as they go about developing tangible innovations that may become commercially successful.

Why is it needed?

Innovation and entrepreneurship are lauded as key to commercial success. Engineering, business and economics students are taught the importance of both, but rarely do the two overlap in a practical way during their studies. While engineering students excel at creativity and developing tangible innovations, they often lack business training to allow those products to become commercially viable. Similarly, business and economics students are taught the importance of being technically innovative without much by way of applying this abstract learning to developing real new products.

Loughborough’s Wolfson School of Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering (Wolfson) and School of Business & Economics (SBE) have leveraged their academic expertise and network of industry partners with the support from Loughborough University London and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to address this challenge.

We are very grateful to adidasOVO Energy and SAIC Motor Corporation Limited for supporting the IDEA. Their generous input into this initiative is helping to develop essential business and technical skills in budding entrepreneurs, and will ultimately help to create exciting, media worthy startups that inspire future generations.

Interested in finding out more?

Students

For further information, please email either Anne Souchon (Business and Economics), Andy Harland (Wolfson) or Adrian Spencer (Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering).

Businesses

If you're interested in supporting the IDEA, please contact Anne Souchon or Andy Harland. For more details, please see Sponsorship Opportunity below.

Amanda Berry

Paul Lepper

Karen Coopman