Support for women in business
The University is to launch a programme of support for women entrepreneurs as part of a roll-out of the UK’s first university network for female business founders.
Five universities, including Glasgow, will join the WE Innovate National network with the aim of supporting 150 women-led teams across the participating institutions each year.
The network will be based on Imperial College London’s flagship competition for women entrepreneurs, WE Innovate – a six-month programme for 25 teams led by students, recent alumni and early career researchers that has successfully established dozens of new women-led startups over recent years.
Imperial invited the University of Glasgow to join, along with Queen’s University Belfast, Swansea University and Durham University. The universities will work together to support the development of WE Innovate National and to adapt the programme to the specific contexts and communities in each region.
WE Innovate was first set up at Imperial in 2014 to address the challenges that women-led businesses often face at the earliest stages of their development, such as limited access to finance, networks and business support.
Over the past ten years, the programme has supported over 500 women, 250 teams, and seen more than 60 startups incorporate at Imperial. These startups have collectively raised more than £40m for their ventures as a direct result of the programme.
For its part, the University of Glasgow has been working to increase its support for women entrepreneurs. Earlier this year, a FemTech Hackathon was organised and run to encourage more women into entrepreneurship under the Scottish Government’s Pathways Forward Pledge initiative. This resulted in five new business propositions being taken forward with female founders leading the way.
Uzma Khan is Vice-Principal for Economic Development & Innovation and Deputy Chief Operating Officer at Glasgow: “The University is passionate about supporting all students and graduates who have aspirations of starting their own ventures. We equally recognise the importance of ensuring that women founders are given every opportunity to develop successful businesses. We are therefore delighted to be asked to participate in the WE Innovate National rollout as a way of supporting women entrepreneurs to establish, grow and scale their ideas into successful businesses.”