Summer Accelerator

Made possible by Santander

Spend your summer vacation working on launching your business with the support of the University behind you. If accepted onto the summer accelerator, you will receive:

a living allowance of £2,000 to cover eight weeks solely focusing on launching your business
use of a workspace for 8 weeks
access to support from the University and five hours of specialist business coaching

You should have a business or social enterprise idea in mind and be committed to putting it into practice over the Summer vacation. The idea should be your own, although applications from two or more students will be considered, again provided that the business idea belongs jointly to the students involved. Joint applications can only receive a single package of support.

We do not expect you to fully develop a successful business in a ten week period. The Summer Accelerator is about exploring the idea to see if it might work on a longer term basis. Discovering that the idea is less viable than you first imagined is a perfectly valid outcome.

All successful applicants must keep a record of their experiences and be willing to share their learning from the experience with future applicants and other students.

Applications for the 2023 cohort close on 31 May.

Apply now

Some of our 2021 cohort

Recent events presented some challenges for our students who made the transition to working online and remotely. The group set up ‘accountability sessions’ to keep each other motivated and on track. The range of ideas that came through were fascinating - you can hear about two examples below. Other ideas ranged from conservation consultancy, flexible to-do list software, a platform that lets offices make the most of their empty space and a new way for charities to record crowdsourced data.

https://youtu.be/fDh_87Od_p4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_xhieT4YRo

After completing the programme, the 2022 cohort attended a celebration evening to share their work and hear input from a panel of experts.

Interested?

If you would like to apply for the Summer 2023 Cohort of the Summer Accelerator programme please apply via Handshake (applications are open). If you haven't already, join the mailing list and our LinkedIn group to stay tuned.