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.”

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.

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.