The Discovery Challenge

The largest competition run by the Enterprise Gym, the Discovery Challenge takes you through the stages of planning a business; including generating ideas, financial projections, marketing, and writing a business plan. Experienced business trainers lead you through eight sessions – all designed to help you build your entrepreneurial skill set and help you learn a bit about business.

Not only is it a fun challenge, but our past participants have gone on to do a huge range of activities utilising the skills they developed here at the Enterprise Gym.

Find out more about our alumni…

The Discovery Challenge is a team competition so you can come along to our sessions on your own, then form a team, or you can come with your friends. Teams can be made up of between two and five members.

Each team comes up with a business idea, either a new product or service, or a novel development of an established idea. They will be helped in this by their assigned mentors from the local business community.

At the end of the Discovery Challenge, teams will pitch their business idea to a “Dragons Den” style panel (our Lions Den session), and submit a completed business plan for judging. The 1st prize each semester is £500. The 2nd prize is £250, and 3rd prize £100. Note that prizes are discretionary based on quality of performance.

The winning teams are awarded their prizes in person at the Annual Awards Ceremony, and the overall winning team is also given six months free incubation space within the university to help them start and develop their business.

Attendance at our training workshops also earns "Practice" points that count towards your awards.

There are five key areas of judging:

1. Business card design and elevator pitches.
2. Marketing strategies
3. Financial planning and projections
4. Lions Den - Business Pitch
5. Business plans

Get in-depth information on what we cover over the eight weeks…