Entrepreneurial students, researchers and recent graduates have won funding to help turn their business brainwaves into emerging enterprises.

Two separate competitions on campus announced their winners last week.

Each of the five winners of the StartUp Sussex competition will receive up to £2,000 as well as mentoring from experts in the Sussex Innovation Centre (SInC), the campus-based business incubator.

The winners of the autumn round are:

• Lyndsay Burtonshaw, an International Relations student. She hopes to utilise abandoned bikes to set up a low-cost bike-hire business on campus.
• Robbie Georgiou, a Geography graduate. His business – Espresso Mushrooms – takes recycled coffee grounds and uses them to grow mushrooms.
• Tianyi Ma, an Information Technology with Business and Management postgraduate. A chess enthusiast, he will offer tuition in the game to adults and set up chess clubs in primary schools.
• Amit Pate and Vu Phong, Information Technology with Business and Management students. They hope that their technological innovation will provide a new way of sharing, in real time, photos of events around the world.
• Matthew Stroud, an International Relations graduate. His Top Order Tours business arranges self-catering, bespoke cricket tours around the world.

Forty students, recent graduates and staff pitched their ideas for a social or commercial enterprise to a panel of judges from the University’s Careers and Employability Centre and SInC, who jointly organise the twice-yearly competition.

Mike Herd, Executive Director of SInC, said: “I have been particularly pleased with the very high standard of entries, but even more impressive has been the vision, innovative thinking and entrepreneurial passion that came across in their pitches to the panel – it bodes well for the future.”

The competition is the culmination of a rolling programme of StartUp Sussex events on campus. It is funded from the HEFCE Higher Education Innovation Fund and by UnLTD, a charity supporting social entrepreneurs in the UK.

Meanwhile, two PhD researchers – Shanyn Altman and Benjamin Keen – will also each receive a £2,000 bursary thanks to an agreement, signed in December 2011, with global bank Santander.

Shanyn is exploring a tutoring agency specialising in English language and literature led by PhD students at the forefront of academia, who are able to teach in a university style and approach texts from new angles.

Benjamin has developed a unique approach to website construction that recognises the device the viewer is using and directs them to a mobile website or a desktop website as necessary.

Shanyn and Benjamin will now have access to a business mentor and the student enterprise suite at SInC.

The scheme is managed by the University’s Doctoral School and delivered by SInC.

Paul Roberts, Assistant Director of the Doctoral School, said: “We are delighted to see the support the partnership with Santander is giving to our student entrepreneurs, whose energy and ideas are becoming vital in delivering economic growth.”