Recap: Co-Founder Speed Dating0

More photos can be viewed on CUE Facebook Page.

By Nicholas Tan

Almost 100 students, aspiring entrepreneurs and seasoned serial entrepreneurs from around Coventry came together to share their ideas and to network at tonight’s inaugural Co-founder Speed Dating event organized by the Coventry University Entrepreneurs (CUE).

Participants were given the opportunity to interact through a fast paced speed dating format, where they had 2 minutes to exchange ideas, and business cards, before being rotated to different partners.

This was designed to give participants the opportunity to meet as many like-minded individuals as possible within a short time, in hopes that they will be able to build strong teams to further develop their businesses and ideas.

Over 20 individuals also took to the stage to give 1 minute elevator pitches of their business ideas to the crowd.

These business ideas spanned a wide range of areas – from the new methods to create embryonic stem cells to a website that analyses patterns in grocery shopping and even an attempt at generating coherent conversational threads from random twitter posts.

Feedback from the participants was extremely positive and most went home with new business partners and even new business ideas.

The climax of the night came when CUE vice president Michelle Stewart announced the 25 winners of the £100 for 100 words competition.

The winning entries for this year can be viewed at www.cue.org.uk.

Next up in CUE’s Business Creation Competition is the £1k competition and it is now officially open. Entrants are required to submit a 1000 word executive summary of their business plan by 20th January 2012 and will stand a chance of winning £1000.

Entry to the £1k competition is open to all and not limited to those that participated in the £100 competition.

To provide additional support for aspiring entrepreneurs in preparing for this upcoming competition, CUE will also be organizing a training session led by two of the competition judges next Wednesday, 23rd November.
Interested parties can register at http://cue1000training2011.eventbrite.com/.