How to enter
Eligibility
To be eligible to win the New Enterprise Competition applicants must satisfy the following criteria:
- One of the founders and current members of the applying team must be a current student or staff member at the University of Bristol or have graduated from the University of Bristol since 2009.
- The idea must be the applicants' own and if any existing intellectual property is involved then that must be owned by the applicants or used with the express permission whoever does own it.
- The enterprise must be new in that it must have only started trading since July 2013.
Business Plan Round
You will need to submit your idea via our Online Idea Development Tool. Register on this site for free with your university email address - no spam we promise! From here you select 'Enter a Competition' and this provides access to the online entry form.
The site is entirely secure and everyone involved has signed a Non-Disclosure Agreement. The site does possess the option to invite advisors by email - this allows anyone of your choosing to see just your idea and leave comments beside your entries. Please only invite advisors you know and trust, and who you have spoken to about supporting your ideas.
Once on the site you'll be asked a series of simple questions about yourself and your idea. Here are some guidelines for answering those questions:
- Please give a brief description of your idea: Can you define your idea in 100 words? Keep it simple, get us interested! Often likening an idea to an existing business the judges are aware of can provide a simple way to convey an idea. You should really summarise what it is, who its for, and how it makes money.
- Please describe the proposed market: In about 100-200 words tell us who the product or service is aimed at - who are the target market? If you can make that market seem attractive please do - by size, by purchasing power, or by how keenly they feel their problem or the gap that your offering will fill.
- How is it different to existing solutions and offerings? In about 100-200 words tell us a bit about the competition or alternatives currently being used by your customers. Tell us how you'll differentiate your product or service to your customers. Tell us how you'll protect your idea from being copied by others.
- Do you have any idea of how to make money from your idea? In about 100-200 words explain your business model. Tell us how you'll make money from your product or service, and maybe even how much and how quickly! Even if you're a not-for-profit we would still expect some description of how your business will be financially sustainable.
- Are you interested in starting a business based on this idea if it proves viable? Ideally you'll say yes to this question, but feel free to show some caution! However, this is a good spot to describe how committed you are to the idea.
There are a series of other questions about whether you've taken up any university support in the development of the idea - but this is just market research for our own activity rather than any basis for judging your idea.
Elsewhere on the site you'll find further, more detailed, questions that help shape a business. These are however not part of the judging process for the New Enterprise Competition.
Team Entries: The Entry Form should be completed online by the principal contact for the team. There are opportunities to identify that you have further team members as part of the Entry Form and if you make the shortlist we will engage with all team members at this stage.
Deadlines: The Entry Forms can be edited and re-edited and will auto-save right through until the set deadline at which point the entries will be locked to prevent further editing before judging.
If you need help and support in developing that plan, make sure you check out our support pages.
Finalist round
Only eight to ten of the Business Plans will be shortlisted by the judges and those entries will go into the Finalist round. In this round the finalists get exclusive access to our mentors and are supported in the development of twenty-page Business Plans.
The judges read the plans and see the finalists deliver 5 minute presentations before making a final decision.
What the judges look for
Entries are judged equally and we look for:
- An original product or service that addresses an evident market need
- A good understanding of both any technology used and the state of the market
- A sound business model that suggests a high-growth business (generating economic and/or social value)
- A capable team with the skills, experience and determination to succeed
The more evidence you can assemble to prove your product, market, business model, and team the better. It might be that you don’t currently have that information or possess the right skill-set, if so, make it clear how you will remedy this over time.
Ultimately, we will always judge well-evidenced business plans better than unproven concepts, but a great concept can go a long way and we will advise you on how to gather the evidence and build the business case.
In the last few years, the winners have included social and commercial enterprises, smartphone apps for birdsong recognition, atomic force microscopes, social networking and fashion-hunting websites.
