Want to challenge yourself and make the best use of your university life? Then here is a good opportunity for you. Santander have just launched the 2015 Santander Universities Entrepreneurship Awards. The Santander Universities Entrepreneurship Awards is an annual business pitching competition. The competition rewards student and graduate entrepreneurs by offering cash prizes. Since the competitions launch, they have already given away more than £176,000 to start-ups and small businesses and have £44,000 to offer in 2015.
This competition has cash prizes of up to £5,000 for undergraduate finalists and up to £20,000 for graduate winners. You can join this competition as an individual, or you can invite your friends or classmates to come and join as a team. Both current Lancaster students and recent graduates may enter. The final winners of the award will be decided in the national finals. In order to win this competition, you will need to compose a business plan, accompanied by an executive summary. The full business plan must be no more than five A4 double-sided pages and should contain information on all of the areas contained within the judging criteria. The appendices cannot exceed two A4 pages (four sides) in total. However, a video (no longer than 3 minutes) can be included as an appendix, but this will count as one of the two allocated A4 pages. The executive summary must be no longer than two A4 sides and should be clear and concise in order to avoid including any information that may not be relevant at this stage.
If you want to join this competition, please do submit by writing to enterpriseteam@lancaster.ac.uk before the midday on Monday 9th March. You will first go through an internal selection process as the university will nominate and submit one business for the Undergraduate and Postgraduate categories. The selected team’s business plan will then be sent to the Santander Judges and the shortlisted applicants will be announced on 24th April. Those application will then be sent to external final judges and on 12th June, finalists from each category will be announced. Apart from the cash prize, finalists will also be given exclusive access to the Santander Universities Entrepreneurship community which offers networking events and business advice to its members.
