Generate endorses innovation for the betterment of society, aiming to continuously connect with the wider world with a belief in the power of proximity as a way of understanding better social problems and subsequently creating more effective solutions. The hub’s first coworking space, in Kentish Town, London, was opened during the pandemic in collaboration with Camden County Council. Converting an empty office block into a vibrant community space, the centre opened its doors not just to over 900 students but any local and impact-driven innovator looking to join a like-minded community. The hub housed an accelerator for single parents, engaged a creative arts charity – Paint the Change – to design the space, and opened its doors to host a family day for the local community. During the pandemic, the team transformed the space into a covid-response centre and co-launched the Dare to Care initiative where our entrepreneurs created PPE out of 3D printers, worked with alumni food and beverage start-ups to distribute over 10,000 essential packages and PPE to key workers in local hospitals and to the most vulnerable in the community. The team raised over £10,000 and donated over £24,600 in Hazmat uniforms to UCL hospital across a period of less than 3 months.

Your role as an entrepreneurial educator is a little like standing in a sweet shop as a kid – the choice of offering that stands before you is exciting as it is overwhelming. Any number of skills development activities can be delivered at any point. We learnt - after numerous bumps along the way - that the best route is deep and narrow. Adopting an entrepreneurial model to our own program, we spend a lot of our time validating, speaking to our end customers at all points, and then focussing on the go-to-market. Only once this backbone (funding competition, mentorship, a basic international events programme and accelerations) was established did we then venture into more unknown and adventurous territories.
We also found that purely focussing on product development meant that an entrepreneur’s wellbeing and founder development issues were constantly overlooked, leading to less healthy businesses overall. Our programme now has a 50/50 split between the two focuses and extensive surveying has suggested that our entrepreneurs are a lot better off because of it.
Finally, we firmly believe that it is only through integrating the learnings and, more importantly, practitioners from the social sciences world into the tech space that we can start to seriously address the most urgent problems of today. The necessary shifts in our society can and will occur by investing in founders with a foundation in the social sciences, who have a cross-disciplinary approach, build diverse teams, and who are trained to consider the “cause of things”.

Widening International Strategy: We plan to increase our international presence by working closely with alumni organisations and ambassadors in new locations around the world. Through ongoing discussions, we are planning to expand our international chapters programme to New Delhi, Nepal, Miami, Toronto, Austin, Rwanda, Kenya, Ghana, Paris and Berlin by 2025.

Developing our Schools Programme: Our next phase will include secondary school students completing an alumni-designed mentorship certificate and engaging with primary school children with the purpose to embed entrepreneurial skills even earlier on so that, by university stage, students are far better equipped to innovate confidently, demonstrate increased resilience, and produce more effective solutions to real-world problems. Over the next 3 years we have the ambition of benefitting 100,000 school children with this programme, delivering real benefit to a wider public, introducing a completely new alternative education that meets the needs of our changing world and extends valuable external recognition to the University as a whole.

Establishing a circular economy: This year, the team will introduce the Founders Pledge; an agreement that invites later-stage entrepreneurs to donate a portion of their profits back to the school upon liquidity, allowing funding for greater monetary support for programmes impacting new start-ups.