Department of Computer Science hosts online Sheffield Startup event for students and graduates

Sheffield Startup Summer is a Student Enterprise event run as part of the Institute of Coding within the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield.
Through workshops and activities, participants discovered their 'Startup Why', identified a problem to solve, explored design thinking with IBM, identified Artificial Intelligence opportunities for startups, met with mentors, built non technical MVPs, pitched their startup ideas, 'pivot or persevere', produced technical prototypes, accessed industry expertise from Barclay Eagle Labs, Kollider (and more), created a technical MVP and finally pitched to a Funders Panel.

The Startup Summer ran online over 11 days, from Wednesday 24th June to Wednesday 8th July. They followed two cycles of startup discovery, initially focused on a 'challenge' as part of a team, with a pitch to industry experts. This then could then be continued with the same challenge or follow participants created their own startup idea with a final pitch to a Funders Panel.

Organiser Andrew Stratton said ‘This year we went fully online with the Sheffield Startup Summer with 30+ students from across the University, and around the world, learning and applying Lean Startup techniques.

There have been excellent innovation proposals within Climate Change, Covid 19, student mental well being, education and job seeking.

MVPs were produced that gained real response from potential users within the 11 days of the event, also building on IBM Watson AI, chat bots, browser plugins, mobile apps, nodeRED, web scraping and more.

This has been a really useful experience for all of us and we are looking forward to next year when we will continue online and also hopefully have physical teams as well.

Results are due in October so keep an eye out here for an announcement