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UCL Advances is UCL’s centre for entrepreneurship and
business interaction,
and it was started in 2007. We were very good
as big institutions at dealing with large corporates,
and the bigger entities that were out there but we weren’t fundamentally very good and
nimble enough
to be able to deal with small businesses and entrepreneurs in an efficient
way.
And Advances was conceived of as a new way for going about that really, a new
way
of addressing those kind of problems and putting together
all the resources in one place that we needed to
talk to and deliver help to would-be entrepreneurs in existing small
businesses.
We celebrated our 5th anniversary this week with
a party. It was really an internal affair so that we could look at
some of the companies that we've helped over the past few years.
We think that we've worked with and assisted well over 300
entrepreneurs and start-up companies from both inside and outside of the
institution in that time,
and we had about 16 of them in a showcases, a fair-type event,
to tell us a little bit about what they were doing. So we had
some of the students who have started companies and gone on to success,
some of the external business that we’ve brought in and offered training to and
support to,
some of the mentors and some of the other organisations,
a cross-section of everybody that we've had involved over the last five years,
all together in one place to say thank you to them as much as anything else.
I think the really satisfying thing for me over the last five years has not been
any one particular
program or one particular activity, or even one particular company,
but the way in which we've been able to grow things with time. When we started we
had a few ideas about
how to help students mainly, and people who were at the beginning of thinking
about and planning
their business, and we helped them with just those activities. We helped them with
business planning
and the training that you need to go through when your first
thinking about your idea.
But with time those first companies have grown,
and as we've grown alongside them, we've been able to push out that bow wave
so that we've been able to to assist them with each step of the journey,
and what’s really pleasing now is seeing companies that are now a couple of years
old,
who've grown through from a business plan, they've raised funding,
which we've helped give the connections to do, they’ve
taken on mentors,
some of which we’ve provided, they've employed staff, some of whom were other UCL students,
or people who’ve learnt through our programmes, and they've gone on to become
successful businesses and we've been able to
to grow and engage with them at each step of their journey
as they have similarly progressed.