30 Business Leaders to be Mentors in Engineering Innovation Competition

Are you an engineering student or graduate in the UK with a penchant for developing innovative ideas to solve social problems? If so, you could try your hand in a competition to get a business leader as the mentor for the project.

As many as 30 business leaders have volunteered to be mentors in the new innovation competition, Mentor30Engineers. They include leaders from the Carbon Trust, Amazon Business UK, INSEAD, Laing O’Rourke, Honeywell Aerospace and RICS, the Sainsbury Management Fellows Charity said in a press release.

Engineers in Business Fellowship, a charity, has been behind the setting up of Mentor30Engineers. The charity awards the Sainsbury Management Fellows MBA scholarship for engineers who want to complement their engineering skills with business education.

Each mentor will provide 30 hours of mentoring, supporting students throughout their degree period or through the early stages of their career. Prizes will be awarded to 30 winners—15 student engineers and 15 graduate engineers.

“Some of the most important issues we face are not just technical challenges, but ones that require the ability to link technologies to an understanding of the market mechanism, business skills and entrepreneurial commercial thinking. Mentor30Engineers gives engineers a chance to stretch their fertile minds and create solutions to big challenges in society,” Sainsbury Management Fellows (SMF) President David Falzani MBE said.

The competition is open to UK-based students and graduates from any engineering discipline as well as undergraduates can be at any stage in their degree course. Full entry details are available on the EIBF/SMF website the organisers can be contacted at [email protected].

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Each participant in the competition has to select a problem from five areas – Healthcare, Environment, Social Care, Finance and Corporate Tax.  They have to write an essay explaining the problem, the innovative solution, how it would benefit the society. The participants are also required to show how they have applied engineering skills and thinking to the idea. The entry deadline is February 28, 2018.

The judges will consider originality, the feasibility of the ideas and evidence of engineering skill in the ideas. The participants with the best ideas will win a leading business mentor. All the mentors are professional engineers and recipients of the Sainsbury Management Fellows MBA scholarship award.

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Each mentor will provide 30 hours of mentoring, supporting students throughout their degree period or through the early stages of their career. Prizes will be awarded to 30 winners—15 student engineers and 15 graduate engineers.

The judging panel comprises Sainsbury Management Fellows including President, David Falzani, CEO of Polaris Associates and an honorary professor at Nottingham University Business School, James Raby, a venture capitalist, Cathy Breeze, SMF Director of Communications and entrepreneur Dr Robin Jones, a partner at Endeavit and Chris Earnshaw, OBE FREng, Chairman of the RAEng Steering Committee for SMF.

“The Mentor30Engineers initiative provides access to an amazing range of expertise and experience from people who have themselves been successful in business. It is also a great example of how those who have benefitted from SMF Awards are able to widen the impact of the scheme by reaching out to the next generation of engineering leaders who have a passion to address some of the major challenges facing society today,” Earnshaw said.

The charity, Engineers in Business Fellowship runs the Sainsbury Management Fellows scholarship and annually awards £300,000 in scholarships to engineers to allow them to study for an MBA at the top international business schools.