Informatics news

An entrepreneurial Informatics Masters student has won funding through the StartUp Sussex competition, which helps students turn good ideas into successful businesses or social enterprises. The award is worth £2,000 and includes mentoring from experts in the Sussex Innovation Centre (SInC), an on-campus business incubator that specialises in helping people get their businesses off the ground.

The Informatics winner is:

• Tianyi Ma, an Information Technology with Business and Management MSc student. Tianyi is a chess expert, and he wants to pass on those skills to other people. Part of his business will be to help primary and secondary schools to set up chess clubs. He'll also be offering private tuition. His enthusiasm is infectious; and his business will open up the world of chess to people who wouldn't have had the opportunity otherwise.

In the competition, 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, the joint organisers.

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.

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