The qEnterprise team recently held our second East London Social Hack at Stour Space, in Hackney Wick. It was a roaring success, and we’re keen to tell you why and to encourage you to get involved next time. To start with, check out the video below.
What is it!?
The East London Social Hack is an intensive weekend bootcamp that gives 60 Queen Mary students and alumni the chance to create social enterprises – commercial businesses that exist primarily to address social problems, not make profit – in just 48 hours!
Why?
Because it shows what a fantastic vehicle (social) entrepreneurship can be for learning a huge array of skills, personal development and positive social change. It also demonstrates the phenomenal amount students can achieve in a short space of time given the right environment.
We’re especially pleased to use the East London Social Hack as a platform to engage with social issues local to East London. The weekend focused particularly on four broad categories: Health, Housing, Community Cohesion and Environment. Stour Space was the ideal space for this: it’s a thriving hub not only for local social enterprises, but also artists, activists and community members fighting for a fairer society. We can’t thank them enough for hosting us.
This is why we recently gathered three diverse entrepreneurs to speak specifically about their failures. The aim was to paint a more candid, human and reassuring image of entrepreneurship by acknowledging (without lapsing into humblebrag) that mistakes are inevitable, just fine and often valuable.
Business ideas are born in many different ways. To show this, and to demonstrate to students that coming up with business ideas isn’t rocket science, we asked the teams on our current InQUBEate cohort to tell us how their businesses were born. This is the second half of their responses; we published 