Finalist

Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year Award

Joanne Zhang

Finalist of the Entrepreneurship Educator of the Year Award

"Empowering student social entrepreneurs and investors from diverse backgrounds."


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Summary

I launched Queen Mary Social Venture Fund (QMSVF) at QMUL in 2020. Adopting the authentic learning approach, the year-long extracurricular programme simulates a real-life social impact venture fund. The fund is led by students and invests in student-led ‘start-ups for good’, the first of such kind of fund in the UK, bringing three main impacts.
First, Education. Students have reported that the programme has significantly enhanced their entrepreneurial knowledge and skills, particularly in areas most challenging to achieve in traditional classrooms.
Second, diversity and inclusion – QMSVF empowers students and recent graduates from diverse backgrounds to tackle some of the biggest challenges facing society today. Diversity and inclusion remain barriers to success in the start-up world1. At QMSVF, 77% of our student investors are from ethnic minorities and 38% are female. Students have reached out to over 200 social ventures and organisations and provided investment and support to four social ventures, all led by female founders.
Third, tackling social challenges – The investments made by QMSVF empower more students and recent graduates to become social change agents. One of our investees Biophilica, turning green waste into leather-like materials - won the Manufacturing Futures Innovation 2021 and has recently raised £1.2m seed round funding.

Key People


Dr Joanne Jin Zhang
Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship & Director of QM Social Venture Fund
School of Business and Management,  Queen Mary University of London, UK


Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the support of the £650,000 SKETCH grant from Office for Students and Research England and the SKETCH team. QMSVF is a part of the interdisciplinary SKETCH project – a student-led knowledge exchange (KE) umbrella programme encompassing social-impact driven consultancy and investment activities from different schools at QMUL, including law, economics and finance, the central career and enterprise team, school of business and management.

Images

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IMPACT STORY

Impacting lifes

QMSVF cultivates entrepreneurial knowledge and mindsets from an investor's perspective and enhances graduate employability. Take an example of a female undergraduate student whom I encouraged to apply for the programme. Although she was interested in entrepreneurship, she never thought of entrepreneurship and investment as a career path. Her active participation in the programme paid off. It was during the high time of the Covid pandemic. She reached out to many social ventures via emails, social media, online conferences etc., and successfully identified Biophilica – one of our investees. The start-up founder was impressed with her entrepreneurial attitude and offered her an internship over the summer. Further, her engagement with QMSVF significantly boosted her confidence and provided many examples to showcase her entrepreneurial knowledge and skills in her job interview. She mentioned that she got a 100% success rate in her job applications thanks to her QMSVF experience. The student reflected, "QMSVF was the best experience I could have had during my BSc (Hons) Business Management degree. Most of the time, I felt that classes lacked practical activities, and at times they could be even a bit monotonous. In contrast, with QMSVF, I could apply the learnings from most of my favourite topics (i.e., strategy, technology) in authentic activities that would benefit a student-led social start-up... The QMSVF also provided a safe environment to make mistakes. It enhanced my chances of success in my future graduate position because I received a lot of guidance from this experiential programme.”

LEARNINGS

Lessons learned

Entrepreneurial leadership, teamwork and collaboration are crucial in designing and delivering this type of programme. It is important to identify the critical resources needed to successfully implement the programme, including academics and professional service team support and external partners engagement.
I outline three simplified steps in designing such a programme. First, to identify student needs and desired learning outcomes and design tailor-made programme for your audiences since student demographics vary by institution, school and programme. Second, to define a complex and ill-structured "real world" problem that may include a subset of interrelated tasks. The complexity and "realness" of the problem often depends on your desired learning outcomes. Third, to cultivate self-directed and interdisciplinary learning, it is essential to encourage students to reflect upon their learning journey using a diary, formal or informal reports. In-depth interviews and reflection sessions can be carried out with the students to discuss their learning journey.

FUTURE PLANS

What's coming?

In Dec 2021, QMSVF won a grant from Esmée Fairbairn Foundation to recognise the programme's achievement in empowering young people from diverse backgrounds to tackle societal challenges. We will be using this grant and support from the University to further develop and scale the programme in the next three years.


KEY STATISTICS

1st

QMSVF is the first student-led social venture fund investing in social ventures founded by students and recent graduates in the UK.

206

Over the last two years, QMSVF has reached out to over 200 social ventures and organisations.

529

529 attended QMSVF events (70% students and 30% partners, public and staff).

77%

77% of QMSVF student investors are from ethnic minority backgrounds. 38% are female students.

100%

QMSVF has made 4 investments in the past two years. 100% of our investments went to female-led/co-led social ventures.

£1.2m

One of our portfolio companies Biophilica – turning green waste into leather like materials - won the Manufacturing Futures Innovation 2021 and has raised £1.2m seed round funding in March 2022.

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