How to setup an Enterprise Club
After recently being asked how we at Aberystwyth have setup an Enterprise Club I thought I’d share with you my observation from a student perspective. Hopefully this information will help to guide you if you’re looking at setting up a club, society or group at University. In the initial question it was suggested that they wanted to setup a business/enterprise club and this was my reply:
Aberystwyth University has a Business Society already but they seem to be focussed primarily on marketing and so there has been a need really for an enterprise club to attract students from all academic departments as the word ‘business’ seems to give the notion that it’s only open to students in that field. A good example I have found is Glyndwr’s Zone, where they are trying to separate the two by using different headings -http://www.rhys.eu/index.php/2010/05/zone-glyndwr-university/ .
The Commercialisation & Consultancy Department often in the past has put on events (under the name of Crisalis) such as business start-up week, graduate taster sessions (run part of WAG) and also the recruitment for the Flux 500 enterprise competition etc. The enterprise club idea was just add-on really… attempting to get a group of like-minded creative people together perhaps to discuss issues, brainstorm and share ideas etc… Saying this, the club is brand new as of yet we don’t have name, we’re either going to be it under Crisalis or a new name altogether. We have so far had two guest speakers in (local entrepreneurs under the Dynamo Role Models, WAG) to kick start off the club…. getting people involved and signed up. I think the plan is to do something similar in September and arrange a few meet-ups. Especially with the society fair during freshers’ week, it’s the perfect time to launch to new students so that they’re aware of the ‘club’ as soon as possible.
You may say that I’m bias but it has been vital to have two student interns (one being me) to communicate with the student population with use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Blogging. These have been useful tools not only informing interested students but also providing a two way communication where they can get in touch with what they want to see from the enterprise club. It’s all about keeping people involved and up to date, reminding them that the club is still about… unlike many others that fall silent after freshers’ week.
I’d like to use the term that David Parrish has come up with.. T-Shirts (creative people) and Suits (business people) and how there’s a need for both. Finding a way of bring the both to work together could be fantastic… many creative people may not know how to turn their product into a business or whether or not it is a product in the first place.
