Students pitch to industry experts

Teams of students pitched creative solutions to real-world business problems to a panel of global and local business leaders.

Across four presentation sessions, students presented their ideas to panels bringing together senior industry leaders, challenge sponsors, and academic leaders, showcasing an impressive breadth of innovative solutions to real-world challenges.

These challenges, set by partners ranging from local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to multinational corporations, spanned topics including responsible AI in healthcare, sustainable travel, employee wellbeing and digital service design.   
 
This year’s module reached its biggest scale yet, with 320 students working in 40 interdisciplinary teams collaborating with 20 industry partners. Over ten weeks, they transformed complex briefs into imaginative, actionable proposals that demonstrated the power of experiential learning at scale. 
 
Professor Julia Bennell, Executive Dean of Leeds University Business School, said:

I thoroughly enjoy attending the student presentations and meeting the industry sponsors. This module is a standout example of our strategy to deliver experiential learning, interdisciplinary working, and industry engagement. Congratulations to the team.

The module is a strong example of Leeds University Business School's (LUBS) commitment to equipping students with the knowledge and skills that align with their career aspirations and the needs of society and employers. Working alongside industry partners enhances students’ professional and experiential learning and gives them the opportunity to work on real-world challenges, preparing them for future employment. 
 
The panel of experts included representatives from KPMG, Leeds City Council, Grant Thornton,  Inspire North and Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber.   
 
Rebecca Fox, Head of Retail at Haribo, said:

What impressed me about the students was the level of engagement and their depth of questioning and understanding of the project. Their enthusiasm really shone through in the presentations. The level of innovation the students demonstrated showed great synergy between them and all we do at Haribo.

At the end of the presentations, the winning team was presented with a plaque sponsored by industry partners, including IBM, First Direct, Marks and Spencer and Vet-AI, which will be installed in the University’s Charles Thackrah Building.   
 
The module’s overall Innovation Award, sponsored by Spark, recognised the most impactful pitches of the year. Spark, the University’s enterprise support service, offered all teams a free viability-assessment consultation and provided £250 for the winning team and £100 for the runner-up. Team 38 won for their reimagining of how a Student Union could use Microsoft AI tools to streamline processes and enhance the student experience, while Team 5 were runner-up for their technology-driven approach to improving recruitment workflows and engagement. 
 
The Innovation Thinking and Practice module this year combines students from LUBS and the School of Computer Science alongside a smaller number of students completing discovery modules from across the University.   
 
Reflecting on the event, Associate Professor and co-module Leader Tony Morgan said:

With the world changing so rapidly, higher education needs to adapt. The industry partners we work with tell us how much the skills the students develop through experiential learning sets them apart in the workplace.  

So many of our students have told us just how much this has helped them, for example to get a graduate job or even changed their outlook to do something different, such as start their own business.

The module is delivered by a long-standing and highly collaborative teaching team: Associate Professor Tony Morgan, Dr Lena Jaspersen, Dr Sanaz Sigaroudi, John Palfreyman, Dr Deirdre Coveney, and Dr Anna Viragos. Over nine years, this team has developed a distinctive, award-winning approach to innovation education, creating three modules for undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. Their commitment to long-term collaboration and team teaching, still rare in higher education, continues to demonstrate the powerful impact such partnerships can generate. The team is now preparing an application for the prestigious Advance HE CATE award. 