Wednesday, 17 March 2010

Tim Savage: Starting up in business and the Bee Club


The first lecture we received at the beginning of this professional practice module was taken by Tim Savage who is presently UWIC’s Entrepreneurship Learning Director and supports students who want to set-up their own business. Within his lecture he explained how to write a business plan and how to evaluate the process and results. He also informed us of the Bee Club, UWIC's Student Union Enterprise club which aims to raise awareness of entrepreneurship.

What is the Bee Club?


The Bee Club is UWIC's Student Union Enterprise club which aims to raise awareness of entrepreneurship and help develop a greater understanding of how you can use the skills of entrepreneurship in your life.

Joining the Bee Club offers the following benefits:

  • Networking events with other enterprising people
  • E-newsletters each term
  • Bee mailing list so your always up to date with events
  • Free food and drink at events
  • Business Start Up Advice workshop
  • Business support
  • CV and interview workshops
  • Access to grant and business funding information
  • Access to the Bees local business contacts
  • Regular Bee and national competitions
  • Development of CV boosting skills
What other help is out there?

Ignite is a Welsh Assembly Government funded, intensive workshop offered to students who wish to learn how to become more enterprising, employable and creative, as well as learning more about setting up their own businesses. Ignite is an intensive 5 day program designed to take you on a journey towards becoming enterprising in you chosen domain; be this business start-up, a social enterprise, the voluntary sector or within an established organisation.


(Images above obtained from UWIC's website)

The week ends with the students pitching for their seed money in a tough Welsh Dragons Den.

How did this lecture help?
This lecture helped greatly in deciding as a group how we could put our designer skills to best use in a business. We came up with the idea of collaborating with an already existing business, that being the Bliss Charity. As a team we wanted to design a business that provided new and innovative charity products to aid Bliss. However, before we could get carried away designing, research was of great importance to fully understand company profile, client profile, competitive market and marketing strategies. Mair Jones, my team member summarised this research into mood boards which greatly helped to begin our business plan.


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