CPD and graduate startups
Queen Mary’s entrepreneurial culture extends beyond its spinouts and business partnerships, with an improved and thriving student enterprise.
Queen Mary has a long record of supporting its students with their business endeavours. Through our Careers and Enterprise service, Queen Mary runs several programmes and sources of funding to aid entrepreneurs in getting their idea off the ground and turn it into a thriving business. Past successes include 'Too Good to Go', a social enterprise that enables restaurants with unused food at the end of the day to sell it to customers at a reduced price.
To get involved or find out more, you can contact Careers and Enterprise.
Inspiring entrepreneurs with QHack and QIcubator
Queen Mary Enterprise provides a full range of support for aspiring entrepreneurs at every stage of their development. QHack is a fun, high-energy bootcamp where our students can learn the basics of getting a business off the ground and meet mentors and fellow entrepreneurs.
QIcubator is a programme for students who are interested in applying their entrepreneurial skills as a consultant or intrapreneur. It allows them to test their business ideas and develop them, while building awareness of the business world and the market for their work.
Both QIcubator and QHack are part of ASPIRE, our programme of career development and entrepreneurship support for students and graduates.
Empowering graduate start-ups
Through its careers and enterprise team, Queen Mary supports students to start something new. Recent Design Engineering graduate Sarah Bailey's startup, Even, designs ultra-low cost period wear that is transforming the lives of some of the world's most vulnerable people.
An estimated 2.8 billion days are lost each year by people who can't afford period products, forcing them to improvise unhygienic, unsuitable or embarrassing solutions. Sarah and her team have used their design engineering knowledge to radically rethink how reusable period underwear is manufactured, putting it in the reach of the global majority. They estimate that Even will return 1 million period days to menstruators in 2025.
In October 2024 Sarah and her business partners Aurusha Kharas and Anushka Mahesh secured £12,500 funding from the Ford Family Foundation through their business competition, Ignite. We are immensely proud of Sarah and to have been part of Even's story.