The Masood Entrepreneurship Centre (MEC), based within Alliance Manchester Business School, is the focal point for enterprise and entrepreneurship programmes for all students, recent graduates and researchers delivered across the campus.

We are currently working with University College London (UCL) on a major two-year research project, funded by OFS and Research England, to address ‘developing entrepreneurial mind-sets in doctoral researchers’ to enable them to apply entrepreneurial thinking to their research and to gain confidence in the commercialisation space. The project will analyse our two models of extra-curricular entrepreneurship capturing qualitative and quantitative data from PhD students in the form of interviews, focus groups and surveys.
The Manchester programme is MCEL60091 Innovation and Commercialisation of Research (ICR) and is for doctoral students in their third year of study within a number of the University of Manchester CDT’s, including Regenerative Medicine. The course is project-based and the research students develop a commercialisation idea based on their own research area.

As part of the research project, we plan to deliver this unit three times in 2020/21 (Semester 1/Semester 2/summer) with around 25 students in each cohort. Each of these student groups will play a key role in our analysis and our overall aim is that a revised version of ICR becomes part of a suite of modular programmes (including online options) for all doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers, delivering long-term impact for the sector.

Each cohort will be helping us to gain a deeper understanding of who currently participates and why, what barriers exist to participation, what benefits can be derived from different types of student activity in different settings, and what are the most effective ways to organise activities so that students learn from them. The evaluation will help steer the future of doctoral training on a national scale, creating innovative PhD founder businesses and commercially equipped researchers.
Doctoral students can register to attend the programme in Semester 2 or the summer; the unit runs over 8 weeks. The two additional sessions are focused on the ‘next steps’ – taking the project forward as a real opportunity and what this would entail. Each weekly session will be delivered through Zoom in scheduled slots – including three taught sessions (2 hours); one group tutorial (1 hour) and three individual tutorials (30 minutes). All preparing the students to deliver a 5-minute pitch of their identified commercial opportunity.

Please get in touch if this is of interest and you would like more information on joining the programme.
My contact details are:
Lynn Sheppard
Director, Masood Entrepreneurship Centre
E-mail: lynn.sheppard@manchester.ac.uk
Mobile: 07711 700581

Related