The Enterprise Day has two purposes,
the first of which is for us to get our community together
and for everybody to recognise what enterprise is at the university
and how important enterprise is
to all of us and how we share a common purpose.
And the second is to get externals in so that we can learn
from their perspective of what our enterprise activity
needs to deliver for society.
So we've had an amazing day today.
We've had students, researchers, companies,
industry leaders come together, which is exactly what we were hoping.
There's been a real energy and buzz for the day, opportunity
to see some of the companies that have started here to talk
about their journeys, to share their insights.
And we really want to build on the success.
I'm Parimala Shivaprasad, a Ph.D.
graduate of Chemical Engineering from the University of Bath
I am the founder of Retra and also co-director
of SMBR Limited, which is another startup for my Ph.D.
during my during my stay at Bath here.
Being a part of the various enterprise activities, from Dragons
Den to being one of the recipients of the Innovation Awards helped me
sort of de-risk my business plan,
being supported by some incredible mentors
here at Bath,
both on the business side, but also being associated
with the Department
of Chemical Engineering, which meant I had a lot of the technical support
as well.
And the space, of course, because a lot of my initial product
development was lab based.
So I always had access to the labs in the departments.
Business starts with an idea.
And I'm just so supportive of what the university is doing in terms
of bringing in ideas and fostering them
and then building an ecosystem around that
and doing it really collaboratively and bringing academia together
with investors and venture capitalists and entrepreneurs
to really build that platform,
for innovation, growth and success.
I was a student at the School of Management at Bath University
well over a decade ago now, and in the period of time
since I've left, I founded three different businesses,
one of which was actually just as I was graduating university,
like many of the people who are here today.
Hi, I'm Natasha,
I'm a student entrepreneur and founder of an ethical beauty app,
which allows you
to discover the ethics behind your favourite beauty products.
And so I first joined Enterprise Bath, one of the student societies
to help actually support your student businesses.
That was in my placement year
when I was setting up my first business, Laguna Lashes.
And they've been really supportive in terms of actually
looking at what it is that it takes for a student to start a business.
If you look around the room
there are a lot of the mentors who are provided by Bath University
and through the Enterprise Society, and I think it's those
mentors that actually weren't around when I was at the University
that I can imagine that these guys value the most
because they're getting that real world step inside
how their business acumen is going to be applied.
The mentorship programmes have been really useful
because it really provides that one on one support,
offers the workshops and engaging events
that are absolutely incredible, to meet other entrepeneurs
and find out expertise in certain areas,
not only supports you in developing your idea
and your business, but also yourself and your own individual skills
as a student entrepreneur.
Being able to do my placement year
for Dopplle and being able to spend that amount of time on
and for the university to say, actually, yes, you can do this,
we kind of
believe in you to be able to at least do it for a year and to treat it
as if it is something that you want to take further, which I did.
So that's probably one thing.
But then the other side is since my final year
and then my master's this year, so the past two years,
I've got really involved with
Enterprise Bath, and so through there I've done a lot of things.
So I've done the Dragons Den, I got through round one,
and I was also successful in round two, which was really great.
I've applied for various awards.
I applied for something through the Santander Entrepreneurship Fund,
and so through that as well, like getting that extra funding while
also doing those workshops that Enterprise Bath offer
and doing all of those networking opportunities, the mentorship scheme
that also they put forward like there was just a lot of different
things I could kind of dip my toe into and see what it was like.
What else can we do to provide the best ecosystem
available to those people in order to support them in the future?
Who else do we need to partner with?
What fundraising might be required,
the different elements to make this the success that it is.
And so we're very keen to hear from other people
and their inputs to make sure we can do it as best as we can.