The Creative Spark Higher Education Enterprise Programme is a five-year initiative supporting international university and institutional partnerships that develop enterprise skills.

The programe aims to boost the creative economy across seven countries in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan), South Caucasus (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia) and Ukraine through UK support. The programme has been developed in response to an underdeveloped creative sector and a demand for entrepreneurship training in the programme countries, supporting wealth and job creation.

The Big Idea Challenge is an entrepreneurship pitching competition organised by London Metropolitan University which this year has been offered as part of Creative Spark.

In April and May, students were supported to develop ideas for new businesses and social enterprises by more than sixty partnership institutions.

In June, panels of local judges deliberated to choose country winners in three categories: Digital Technology, Social Impact and Creative, as well as overall national champions. In addition, over 40,000 individuals participated in a public vote to identify the most popular idea for each of the seven Creative Spark countries. The international judging panel then selected one overal public vote winner.

At the end of August and beginning of September, eight teams (the seven country champions and one international popular vote winner), comprising fifteen individual team members overall, travelled to London Met’s Accelerator workspace, at the heart of the major UK tech startup cluster ‘Tech City’, to take part in a three day ‘Startup Sprint’.

This intensive course culminated in each team pitching their idea to a panel of entrepreneurship experts.

Then on 3rd September, at a gala dinner in Oxford, an overall Grand Champion and three cateogry winners were announced.

Eight winning teams took a share in £25,000 of cash prizes business support and a further fifteen teams received business mentoring. Please email us on info@creativespark-bigidea.uk for further information about the competition.

Here are the eight international finalists…