Our first meeting in London was a panel discussion with students and professors of London School of Business and Finance.

First stop was Cambridge.

We decided to visit Cambridge Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning because the University of Cambridge is one of the world's most respected universities. Established in 1990, the School is a provider of management education and is consistently ranked as one of the world's leading business schools. The Centre is aimed at individuals wishing to develop their own business. Lucy Graves, project manager of Centre tells us about programs which focuses on practical learning through the efficient communications. Thus, Centre provides access to entrepreneurial networks, business angels, academics, venture capitalist companies, regional development agencies, enterprise centre, alumni communities and other institutions. There is a program that we would like to implement in our centre, it is called "Enterprise Tuesday". It is a series of free evening lectures and networking sessions managed and delivered by the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning since 1999. The program aims to introduce participants to the world of business, as well as to encourage and inspire individuals to pursue their entrepreneurial ambition. They have strong collaboration with students through their communities. So, there are several things which are very important for us: we should find key individuals; have strong union and mission for it; create eco-system; and try not to become a buzz word.

Our first meeting in London was a panel discussion with students and professors of London School of Business and Finance.

The main goal of visiting LSBF was to meet with students and share the ideas about the projects of creating the Centre for Entrepreneurship in FINEC. We would like to thank Roy Butcher, Academic Dean of LSBF, Nadim Chaudry, the Head of Career Service and Employability, Asmik Magakian, Global Events Manager, Arseny Vlasov Strategic Corporate Business Developer, CIS and Elena Kaverina, Regional Director, CIS for a very motivating and informative start of our programme.

LSBF doesn’t have a special center for entrepreneurs, but what differentiates the School from many other Higher Educational Institutions is their primary orientation on developing practical business skills and relevant knowledge. The curriculum is focused on business education and development of social and presentation skills. There are a lot of students from different countries who create multicultural context of doing business, it’s a great competitive advantage of this university. It’s a school where students come to the ideas “how to create business” while studying and peer-to-peer communication.

We’ve met very inspired and experienced students, most of them have their own business or have had experience of running their business. They have entrepreneurial view on every process and help us to see the Center for our University as a commercial project.

This visit was really important for our group because we found some gaps in our project and the questions to discuss. Students pointed out that we should work on how to attract right people to our center and what we can give in return. We should identifying needs of students and set real and achievable goals for our center.

The Accelerator of London Metropolitan University

The Accelerator is London Metropolitan’s business incubator is situated in Shoreditch, which provides professional support to both students and external individuals. The university is established only for 10 years, however it is one of the leading business universities in Great Britain. The importance of the Accelerator and the Centre itself is that it is part of the university with a developed system of support, through which students and alumni get essential opportunities to become entrepreneurs, space to work on their projects, professional advice and networks as well as access to finance.

Richard Celm, a manager of the Centre for Entrepreneurship, who organized our meeting, made a very informative and dynamic presentation on the Accelerator. It was very important for us to ask questions on the Accelerator activities and we had a chance to learn a lot for our Centre of Entrepreneurship. He told us that the Accelerator Centre is open for students of any age and department. The Centre has developed a procedure of developing business skills and extending entrepreneurial knowledge as a preparation before the incubation process.

The Accelerator is well-equipped and provides physical space for the participants of the courses to work on their projects before the competition and afterwards. Therefore they can stay in the Accelerator after launching the project. These options could be taken to the project of the Centre for Entrepreneurship in FINEC.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 820