THE director of a major entrepreneurial prize for academics and students in Scotland has said it is on course to attract a record number of entries.
Olga Kozlova said entrants to the Converge Challenge have formed more than 20 companies, created 60 jobs and secured around £4 million funding.
Ms Kozlova expects this year's competition, the fifth to be run, to have somewhere between 70 and 80 entries, which would build on the 60 submitted in 2013.
She indicated the incorporation rate among shortlisted entrants is running at around 30% and said: "That is actually quite high. Some people go through the training with us and decide they want to stay doing academic research but we hope we encourage them all to think more entrepreneurially.
"If you want to build sustainable companies then you have to get sales and to do that you have to get to customers.
Ms Kozlova said she has been impressed by the volume of entries from women and academics who are immigrants to Scotland. Shortlisted companies go through a selection process before winners are announced in September.
The value of the top prize is £60,000. Previous winners include life sciences companies BryoActives and Arxbio, software business Bellrock Technology and medical equipment firm Saccade Diagnostics.
The competition has the Entrepreneurial Exchange as one of its backers for this year and is also operating a category for social enterprise for the first time.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article