By Michele Barbour
It’s not long now before I will be able to announce the University Early Career Enterprise Fellows for 2025. Exciting times!
It seems a great time therefore to share another of our 2024 ECEF stories, this time from our School of Education. Nick Gray, PhD and his colleagues developed a product called Tabletop Travels, which is a box containing sensory experiences that transports the recipient to exotic places. Their target market is older adults, who may be unable to travel themselves. I saw the Tabletop Travels product for myself at the Festival of Enterprise last year and could so easily picture what a lovely experience it would be for people in my own circle who for one reason or another are unable to travel and can suffer from isolation.
When asked how he had found the ECEF experience, Nick commented:
“The ECEF enabled me to understand so much more about the commercial possibilities available to our fledgling social enterprise. With this training and support, I was able to contribute effectively to a marketing strategy that really helped us get Tabletop Travels (https://lnkd.in/eSStZwbu) noticed. This work will stand us in good stead as we take our product to market in the next few months. Even though our multisensory travel box for older adults was something of an outlier among the amazing AI and engineering innovations of the other fellows, I always felt that our business mentors recognised its value. The whole fellowship has give me the impetus to push forward with the commercialisation of our idea and we look forward to our first batch of product going out to customers in the coming months. Thank you to all our business trainers and the other fellows for their encouragement, support and friendship.”
When we talk about academic entrepreneurship we often jump straight to the tech innovation – and with good cause, there is much amazing, exciting and impactful innovation across digital, quantum, AI, life sciences, and other sectors. But we mustn’t forget the impact academic enterprise can have in social enterprise and social value, and Nick and his colleagues’ work is a wonderful example of this.
By chance I processed at graduation last week and who was on the front row but Nick himself! Congratulations on your PhD graduate Dr Gray and looking forward to see what you and the Tabletop Travels team do next.