25k Award

25k Award

Welcome to the £25K Entrepreneurship Award – the search for the next big thing!

The £25K Entrepreneurship contest is a commercial educational experience designed to encourage researchers and individuals to act on their talents, ideas and energy to produce tomorrow’s leading commercial opportunities. The programme helps identify, qualify, prepare and present the best knowledge-based ideas and intellectual property from the publicly funded research base in Northern Ireland with the most commercial potential.

Northern Ireland is highly acclaimed for its achievements in research and development, and the £25K Entrepreneurship Award is privileged to work with and help support the commercialisation of this world class research.

Key to the process of commercialising these innovations is access to networks of trusted, experienced and connected individuals who can help to test, develop and validate the commercial potential of promising science and technology.  We do this by encouraging research staff and students to enter and then leveraging the wisdom of the private sector crowd to develop ideas and identify the best.  Through engagement in the £25K Award, the support, contacts, networks and introduction to commercialisation training is invaluable.

Through the £25K Award, applicants will experience the unique opportunity to connect and engage with established science and technology corporations, entrepreneurs, service providers and investors who are interested in promising technology.  This programme will connect the inventors with relevant stakeholders to increase the propensity of commercialisation and turning breakthrough ideas into reality.

The refinement process of the competition, its network of mentors, investors and potential partners, and the cash prizes awarded have helped many of these teams of the past to act on their dreams, engage in commercialization and some have built their own companies and fortunes.

2012 Category Sponsors:

2011 teams Testimonials:

FLISH – Overall and Hitech Category Winner

“It would be difficult to sum up in only a few sentences the benefits of the 25K process. Here are some of the highlights: The ability to see research from the customers point of view. Instead of having a piece of research that I think is wonderful and trying to flog it to customers, instead I have learned to find out what the customer wants first.

Before 25K I had not given much thought as to how my research could become a commercial venture. After 25K the commercial venture is close to reality.

Being the overall winner of 25K has assured our team (and potential customers/partners) of the enormous potential of our technology. We are now committed to bring the “Flish” into the world marketplace and have ambitious plans to make this happen.” Neil Buchanan, FLISH

RegenaGraft

“As a scientist, the 25K Award made me for the first time really explore the commercial opportunities that my own research presented. Up until now, whilst I have always wanted to start a business, I doubt I would have had the confidence or indeed the know-how as to how to realise this dream. The 25K Award has help me developed all the skills and given me the iniative to try to start a business. In addition it has put me in contact with a number of outstanding mentors, potential investors, collaborators and even potential customers. I will now look at all my research endeavours and be constantly asking the question “What commercial potential does/could this have?” Peter O’Hare, RegenaGraft

GenSaf

“The NISP CONNECT 25K Award process facilitated two teams – AFBI (veterinary virologists) and SiSaf (inventors of the patented nanoparticle platform) – with a blend of ideas of how to exploit the technology in the animal health sector, becoming one team – GenSaf – with a vision of commercialisation of an effective value-added product. We benefitted from the exposure to local business people and other entrepreneurs and innovators, and the structured approach of the team at NISP CONNECT. During the 5-6 month process, we focussed our ideas, and developed and tested our team, our strategy and our product. We honed skills in pitching our concept – initially at the Quick Pitch and later in the Company Presentation – as well as structuring a Business Plan around our current needs. While GenSaf found the 25K Award beneficial to keeping us on track through the early stages of our business start-up, the team also found the 25K Award personally rewarding and really enjoyable experience!” Simon Doherty, GenSaf

Lewis Fertility

“Being involved in 25K was great! It turned the steep learning curve of becoming an entrepreneur from a quagmire of confusion into an exciting positive experience!

For me the big benefits were: Being mentoring by peoples who have succeeded; Having access to the brightest business brains in NI; Building confidence!” Sheena Lewis, Lewis Fertility

BMT

The 25k Award programme was a perfect opportunity for us to look at the technology from a real commercial perspective. The mentoring and support throughout the programme was extremely useful giving us free access to financial and business advisers. Yannis Salomeia, BMT