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Venture Out 2013 competition winners announced

13 Dec 2013

The winners of the Venture Out 2013 ideas competition were revealed at an awards ceremony on Thursday, 12 December.

Venture Out 2013 winners

This year’s competition attracted a record 126 entries with 20 making it through to the final round.

The winners were:

Business category

  • First prize - Kuok Si Nok (School of Languages, Arts and Culture) and Qiuhao Xu (Manchester Business School) with their Intacycle bike rack idea - an anti-theft bicycle parking rack.
  • Second prize - MBA student Claire Baynton-Glen with Nosh.com – a takeaway site for people with special dietary requirements.
  • Third prize - Ryan Shoesmith (School of Psychological Sciences) for Everyday Autism which provides clinical expertise for at-home behavioural support solutions.

Graphene category

  • First prize - Uybach Vo, Stanislava Panova and Eve Blumson (Faculty of Life Sciences) with their idea to turn seawater into energy by desalinating and extracting precious ions.
  • Second prize - MBA student, Liam Wadsworth (Manchester Business School), with his body armour idea, Graphene Warrior.
  • Third prize - Faisal Rauf (Manchester Business School) with Graphotanks - an idea to reconstruct gas cylinders using the Manchester discovered wonder material.

Social category

  • First prize - Kuok Si Nok and Qiuhao Xu, picking up their second award of the competition with the Silverlining Home Refurbishment Project, designed to help the underprivileged.
  • Second prize - Liam Wadsworth with Re-Think – an idea that uses rubbish to simultaneously help the underprivileged and advance scientific knowledge.
  • Third prize - Kasia Wilk and Davy Guo (School of Environment, Education and Development) with International Well-Being Support Service which provides culturally responsive mental health support for international students.

Technology category

  • First prize - Daniel Jamieson (Faculty of Life Sciences) and Radu Nedelcu (School of Computer Science) with Biorelate - a biomedical data extraction, data maintenance and data licensing company.
  • Second prize - Joel Albert Padilla (Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences) and Ng Yin Ling (School of Law) with Temp Tab – a sticker that can be applied to any object to show its temperature.
  • Third prize - David Shiwei Xuan with the DNA microarray to personalised medicine.

Cash prizes of £500, £250 and £100 were awarded to first, second and third place winners in each category.

Competition Director, Dr Martin Henery, said: “It’s fantastic to see the popularity of the competition growing year-on-year and to see so many fantastic new business ideas from across the University. The prize money won today will help the winners to develop their ideas with the aim of taking them forward and making them a reality.”