Engineers in Business Competition winners announced

28 February 2023

Engineers in Business Competition winners announced

Three finalists pitched their ideas in last night’s final to be crowned the first Engineers in Business Competition winner.

Chirioco, Friends of Farmers and Heard each pitched their innovative solutions in front of 35 people and a panel of three judges. Heard was announced the winner, receiving £3,000 to further develop their idea.

I feel honoured, blessed, and grateful that I was not only able to share Heard with others but receive incredible feedback and support on the future of it. It has shown me that Heard is possible. The prize money will facilitate further research and testing with a greater data set of languages and explore how speech-to-speech translation can happen alongside new AI/ML algorithms. I am really excited to see what the future holds."
Rumeesa Rais, MSc MedTech, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship (King’s Business School and Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine)

Funded by the Engineers in Business Fellowship (EIBF), a registered charity promoting the importance and value of business education to engineers, the competition invited students and alumni from Engineering, Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences to share ideas that addressed one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).

Meet the finalists:

Chirioco

Our goal is to help improve the future sustainability of buildings by acting as an interactive portal of information, where anyone can access an autogenerated report of how to achieve net zero carbon for their property, free of charge.

- Edward James, MSc Robotics (Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences)

Friends of Farmers

An innovative engineering toolkit for small-scale farmers in Kenya to minimise food insecurity and empower knowledge transfer.

- Mei Tuson (PhD) with team members Fabio Vescovi, Naomi Mwingi and Ben Gori (Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences)

Heard

Inefficiency when communicating in healthcare disrupts patient care and can be life-threatening. Heard is addressing the problem of language barriers in improving healthcare delivery, to seamlessly allow patient and provider to hear each other.

- Rumeesa Rais, MSc MedTech, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship (King’s Business School and Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine)

Heard will now have the opportunity to represent King’s College London in the EIBC Champion of Champions Competition later this year.

This was the first year that the Engineers in Business Competition has come to King’s, delivered by Dawn Bonfield MBE FREng, the Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence in the Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences, in collaboration with the Entrepreneurship Institute.

In preparation for the Pitch Off final, teams were invited to attend Idea Factory workshops to support idea validation and to develop their pitching skills.

This competition was a perfect vehicle for allowing entrepreneurial engineering students the opportunity to test their ideas for solutions that address the sustainable development goals, which is one of our overarching priorities at King's. It was fabulous to see the ideas that the three finalists came up with, and it is very heartening to see students addressing sustainable development, so creatively as entrepreneurs and change-makers."
Dawn Bonfield, Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence, Department of Engineering

On Wednesday 1st March the Entrepreneurship Institute will host its next Pitch Off final for this year’s Idea Factory Competition. 10 finalists will pitch their business ideas for the chance to win a share of the £8,000 prize fund and further mentoring support. There’s still time to vote for your favourite to win this year’s People’s Choice Award.

If you have a potential idea for a business, you can:

Book an Idea Feedback Session with a member of the Entrepreneurship Institute team to share detail and receive feedback on next steps.
Join the Women Entrepreneurs Network, a community of King’s students, alumni and staff that supports idea and entrepreneurial skills development for founders identifying as female or non-binary.