Warwick Apprentice winners awarded £1000

Mia Armstrong, Arajld Gordani and Xiang Lijie (Jenny) were announced as the winners of the Warwick Apprentice at the final, held on Monday 14 February.

As pointed out in the final ceremony, ”Their consistency throughout the competition, their passion about their product, as well as the way they engaged with their audience and suitability of the launch made them stand out”.

The competition was far from easy as a total of 70 students applied for the contest; 14 teams with four members in each, though the winning team have three as one member dropped out of the competition.

“Last year, Warwick Entrepreneurs organized Oripprentice in collaboration with Oriflame but this year we wanted to redesign it completely to bring out the business skills and talent of students instead of their selling ability,” said Nikhita Giridhar, the Vice President of Warwick Entrepreneurs Society.

“After months of planning, we divided the competition into five stages: product development, creating a business plan, marketing strategy, pitch and finally launch party”, said Giridhar.

Teams had just 24 hours to create their ideas at each stage, yet they got the competition brief two days in advance as organisers ”wanted to push through the fact that teams should plan ahead for a competition and pre determine what the division of labour will be”. Once the competition started on Monday, 7 February, they had 24 hours to develop their product, and following that, 24 hours to write up a business plan. After this, the bottom six teams were eliminated ”in order to make sure no one’s time was being wasted”.

The judges of the competition were Dr Mike Shulver, Karen Bradbury, Mike Shulver, Stephen Roper, Karen Bradbury and Aaron Davis.

Following the announcement of the results of the business plan stage, teams had a further 24 hours to put together their marketing as well as a pitch. Soon after it, two final teams were announced: Team Watchout and winning Team Cybersmart.

“The Apprentice was incredibly demanding for all of us, but thankfully it was only for a week,” explained Armstrong, a final-year French and International Studies student. “It was really great to get feedback from both academics and business people from Coventry and the University. It was a bit surreal to be told we should consider going into business when we’d each entered for very, very different reasons”, said Armstrong.

Lijie, Armstrong and Arajild are considering of setting up a business with their idea; a device that prevents people from losing their USB sticks.

The winning team receieved £1000 prize money and will be getting a lot of media and business exposure for their efforts. ”We will be sending them to the Nacue Leaders Conference this month”, said Giridhar, and they were also introduced to the audience at Be Your Own Boss event, also organised by the Warwick Entrepreneurs on February 23rd.

When questioned on what the team felt they would change for next year’s competition, Gridhar noted: “We’d probably not underestimate the number of students applying and will arrange for the entire show to be filmed so that non-participating students can watch. We also hope to gain additional sponsorship money from Accenture to reward the runners up.”

“I would say this was one of the best investments of my time here at Warwick and I feel the winners echo the sentiment”, concluded Giridhar.