At QUT, entrepreneurship is more than starting a company. It is the ability to identify opportunities, solve problems, mobilise resources, learn from uncertainty and create value for others. These capabilities enhance learning and career success, are relevant across all disciplines and can be expressed through commercial, social, creative, community and researched-based ventures.
The QUT Excolo! Student Founder Prize recognises student founders demonstrating these key capabilities, through their venture, which provides evidence of their capability, their initiative, innovation, leadership and impact. Applicants are therefore evaluated not solely on the scale of their venture, but on the progress they have achieved, the challenges they have navigated, the evidence they have gathered and the value they are creating.
Specifically, the Prize:
- recognises and promotes outstanding student founders,
- celebrates entrepreneurship across all disciplines,
- highlights the breadth of innovation occurring across QUT,
- strengthens connections between students, researchers and industry,
- create pathways for founders to further develop their ventures and networks.
Finalists will present at the annual Excolo! pitch competition (19 Nov) to showcase the breadth of innovation across QUT.
Founders can enter as solo founders or as a team and will be evaluated as such. (Entries with more than one QUT student as a founder will be treated as a single entity and any financial award received will be evenly split between the QUT students on that team).
Applicants must:
- Be a founder or co-founder of the commercial, social, creative, community and research-based venture.
- Be enrolled at QUT at the application closing date.
- Play a significant leadership role in the commercial, social, creative, community and research-based venture.
- Demonstrate evidence of venture progress beyond the idea stage.
- Be able to demonstrate that the founding team has a legitimate and defensible right to develop and commercialise the intellectual property at the heart of the venture.
- Complete your Expression of Interest.
Register now
