Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship Community of Practice

Aspect is organised into cross-institutional, cross-disciplinary communities, designed to capture and share knowledge across five core areas of practice. The Entrepreneurship Community of Practice (CoP) seeks to identify entrepreneurship opportunities for social sciences students, and share knowledge and expertise.

To find out more, or to join the Entrepreneurship Community of Practice, please contact Luke Mitchell Luke.Mitchell@sussex.ac.uk or Emma Mirams E.Mirams@lse.ac.uk

Who is involved?

The Entrepreneurship CoP is comprised of volunteers drawn from the Aspect member institutions; mainly, university support staff and academics who work with student and alumni entrepreneurs. For example, current members include acceleration leads, enterprise managers, entrepreneurship centres, careers services teams, innovation centres, and others.

What do we do?

The Entrepreneurship CoP exists to:

• Elevate the profile of the social scientists within enterprise & entrepreneurship
• Deepen the understanding of social sciences entrepreneurship through the sharing of best practice
• Support members by working collaboratively
• Work together to bring or create new collaboration opportunities for students and alumni
• Bring together entrepreneurial talent across university members
• Promote social sciences innovation, and what is unique about social science entrepreneurship (as compared with STEM)

The group are working together to generate and share good practice in social sciences student enterprise and entrepreneurship via a range of projects, including:

• Entrepreneurship Workshop Series – The Entrepreneurship CoP is hosting a series of monthly virtual workshops for CoP members, aimed at sharing good practice, building institutional capacity and generating insights that can be applied in member institutions. The workshops are generating a series of blog posts, and will lead to the production of a toolkit and other resources in 2021. Speakers and guests are invited to join some of the workshops
• Aspect Student Accelerator Programme (ASAP) – The first joint-university accelerator of its kind in Europe, this social sciences accelerator aims to support and scale socially responsible student and alumni ventures from Aspect member institutions. Twenty teams are participating in the pilot, which launched in September 2020. The programme is hosted by LSE and supported by the Entrepreneurship CoP members. The Accelerator aims to address specific gaps and challenges faced by social sciences entrepreneurs
• Ecosystem Mapping Project – This project aims to develop entrepreneurial ‘roadmaps’ for each Aspect institution, modelled on Oxford’s existing resource. Developing roadmaps for each institution will enable comparison of offerings between institutions and provide a chance for Aspect members to share good practice on how to support a social science focused entrepreneurial ecosystem for students. The project will capture what resources already exist and produce a matrix, enabling members to identify opportunities to share good practice
• ‘Inside the Founder’s Mind’ Podcast – This 10-part podcast includes interviews with business leaders, entrepreneurs and neuroscientists that explore in depth the entrepreneurial mindset and discuss key traits such as resilience, stamina and facing failure. This series will provide social science students with dedicated resources aimed at informing, inspiring and preparing them for life as an entrepreneur. The content is co-produced by student entrepreneurs, with support from LSE
• Creative Challenge Series – This series of four events, held in August and October 2020, brought together artists and academics whose work aligns with the Industrial Strategy challenges. The format of these events was ‘in conversation with’, with videos, music and audience interaction built into the live and virtual events. Hosted by LSE, the outputs are now available via the above link