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, and vice versa
  • 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

Resources View all

35 resources | Page 1 of 2

30 May 2023

Zinc offers an Innovation Internships scheme for PhD students to learn about early-stage innovation within placements in start-ups

This is a detailed report available to Aspect members about Zinc’s offerings of the Aspect-funded Innovation Internships scheme that supports students from both disciplines, SHAPE and STEM, for three-month placements outside academia, with mission-focused start-ups to gain commercial experience.

12 October 2021

Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Map

Interactive map detailing the entrepreneurship offerings at member institutions.

11 October 2021

Aspect Learning Gain Report 2021

Our annual summary of insights and learnings from across the Aspect programme

30 September 2021

An exploratory look at social sciences intrapreneurship

An overview of intrapreneurship; why it’s important and examples of university intrapreneurship.

30 September 2021

Introducing ASAP Club…

Many students have innovative ideas that would benefit from further guidance and support, whether they end up building ventures or not. Continuing to extend support to an already actively interested group is an efficient avenue for stimulating and growing the social science innovation pipeline. 

27 September 2021

A look back at the challenges faced in engaging and supporting social science entrepreneurship

One of the key challenges discussed among Aspect Entrepreneurship CoP members concerns the language around entrepreneurship. Are the ways in which entrepreneurship has been communicated relevant to some social sciences disciplines?

27 September 2021

Zinc Case Studies

Case studies demonstrating some of the partnerships between Zinc ventures and universities.

27 September 2021

Creative Challenge Series Event Report

Summary of the event, sharing lessons and guidance on how to run similar events.

24 September 2021

Ecosystem Audit Outputs

Drawing on the wealth of entrepreneurial activities and opportunities that exist across the Aspect network.

29 July 2021

ASAP: Post-Programme Outputs

An update on how ASAP is supporting a like-minded community of student entrepreneurs who are building socially impactful and responsible scalable businesses.

20 July 2021

Podcast mini series: The ASAP Club

The mini-series aims to inform, inspire, and prepare early-stage innovators, preparing them for life as an entrepreneur.

21 June 2021

Introducing Social Shifters

A Q&A session from the Aspect Entrepreneurship Community of Practice.

7 June 2021

ASAP: Learnings from Joint University Social Sciences Accelerator

How to help impact-driven
founders change the world
for the better

2 June 2021

ASAP Club Digital Toolkit and Mini-Project

The ASAP Club aspires to establish a digital support structure.

28 May 2021

Creator Fund Webinar

Encouragement for those to pursue an entrepreneurial journey.

27 May 2021

Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Mapping: Case studies

Case studies from the Aspect Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Mapping funded project.

12 May 2021

Supporting student enterprise with a (very) small team

Getting ‘bang for your buck’ A Q&A session from the Aspect Entrepreneurship Community of Practice.

12 May 2021

Creating a user-centric pathway for entrepreneurial support

A Q&A session from the Aspect Entrepreneurship Community of Practice.

29 April 2021

ASAP Webinar – Launch Event

ASAP Webinar Launch event

29 March 2021

Case study: Blue Shoes Productions

Blue Shoes Productions is a socially responsible production company based in Manchester.

Page 1 of 2

Entrepreneurship

Identifying entrepreneurship opportunities and sharing knowledge and expertise

Entrepreneurship

Business Engagement

Building a shared network of business partnerships and industry engagement

Business Engagement

Communications

Raising the profile of social sciences, arts and humanities research commercialisation and supporting communication and network engagement

Communications

Research Commercialisation

Sharing best practices and identifying new and experimental models

Research Commercialisation

Academic Champions

Coming soon

Academic Champions