Small, agile players such as start-ups are key to the defence supply chain. E-track supports students to commercialize their research via Edinburgh Innovations’ PhD Max and The Bayes Centre’s Venture Builder Incubator.
PhD Max is an introduction to entrepreneurship, while for VBI, students bid for a place on a programme that guides participants to develop a robust commercialisation and funding strategy. It includes mentoring, access to business advisors, incubation, entrepreneurial courses, acceleration, and a network of investors, researchers, peers and industry.
Overall, the programmes support business fundamentals such as IP strategies, start-up creation, pitching, product, and service design, identifying valuable propositions, competitor analysis and market research, funding landscape, and how to run a business (e.g., the “company formation toolkit”). This gives founders the skills to validate the commercial potential of their idea and communicate it to investors and stakeholders. Collectively, the Bayes Centre and EI have accelerated 280 tech ventures, helped start-ups raise over £150M over the last 4-years and helped 150 UoE student businesses raise £30M+ in the last year alone.
To support e-track, SPADS will have a programme of defence- and investment-oriented speakers and events, and will provide additional funds for start-up prototyping, especially in the arena of hardware-related start-ups. The entrepreneurial path will be an important element of activities such as the industry challenge and hackathons.
