Why student enterprise deserves to be taken seriously - Professor Simon Mosey

Student entrepreneurs aren't always taken seriously. Reduced to ‘side hustles’ and campus curiosities, their ventures are often assumed to be less worthwhile than other businesses, temporary rather than transformative. But Professor Simon Mosey, who has spent more than two decades researching and supporting student enterprise at Nottingham, sees something very different.

"People tend to be a bit pejorative, saying students are only interested in putting on nightclubs and selling t-shirts," he says. "But really, these are the decision-makers and the consumers of the future."

Mosey is well placed to comment: HESA figures for 2023/24 show the University of Nottingham ranking sixth nationally for entrepreneurship, with student and alumni businesses turning over nearly £129m. But he is wary of reducing the story to just money.

"In policy circles, there’s a very economic view on entrepreneurship: it's about creating jobs, turnover, paying taxes, which is entirely logical," he says. "But, as a university we can take a broader view, looking at the individual, their professional development, their understanding of their own potential. It's not just about the economic outcome. There's the impact on students' lives - giving them agency, helping them to mature, making more informed career choices."

And it's not just about venture creation. Some will start businesses, but many more will carry entrepreneurial thinking into whatever they do next - whether in healthcare, finance, policy, tech or the creative industries.

Working with Professor Einar Rasmussen in Norway and colleagues at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, Mosey has been comparing student entrepreneurship across three very different systems. Their research points to a generation motivated by sustainability, mental health, inequality and the future of work – and one determined to act on it.

"We really need to be paying attention, because student entrepreneurship is very different to any other kind of entrepreneurship,” he says. “You've got individuals at a really interesting time in their lives: transitioning from being students to becoming adults, gathering knowledge from the university, and thinking about what that means for what they care about."

"They all care about young people's mental health. They really care about environmental sustainability. And they care about this whole debate about robots and AI changing the workforce in potentially negative ways, and they want to be part of framing that differently."

At Nottingham, where enterprise programmes have been running for 30 years, the evidence is all round. HESA data backs this up: as well as its top six entrepreneurship ranking, the university ranks fourth nationally for turnover from social enterprises and community-focused businesses.

Much of this activity runs through the Haydn Green Institute and its programmes. The Ingenuity Lab, which supports around 400 student and alumni ventures at any time; Ingenuity Impact, focused on social enterprise and community entrepreneurs; and the Your Entrepreneurs Scheme (YES), now in its 30th year, helping early-career researchers commercialise science and technology.

Another key finding from Mosey’s research is borne out of Nottingham’s global student body: young entrepreneurs who move from concern to action often share some kind of international experience. "The most obvious ones are international students," says Mosey. "They've moved to another country and said, whoa, things are different over here - some things in my own country are much better, and we need to be doing that over here."

An example of this is Nottingham alumnus Kelu Liu, who founded food delivery app Hungrypanda after struggling to find authentic Chinese food as an international student in the city. Today, it operates in cities across the world, has over 10m users and has raised over $275m in seed investment to date.

Mosey thinks cross-pollination is essential for innovation – exposing students from outside the school to entrepreneurial thinking, whatever their discipline. "The Business School tries to open up as much of what it does to other parts of the university," he says, citing the circa 4,000 students a year who take entrepreneurship modules at Nottingham, many as electives from other faculties.

A global study of digital start-ups founded by students shows why. Teams combining business and STEM expertise outperformed single-discipline founders, as expected. "But the real surprise for us was if you had a student from the humanities in the founding team, they were the businesses that absolutely flew."

Mosey puts it down to what he calls responsible innovation. "Understanding human behaviour, understanding how these things are going to benefit the human condition - concerns that the humanities are steeped in. Cultural value, the arts, music, all of those things. Bringing them into the digital world seems to be the intersection where the magic happens."

But that understanding of the human condition isn't only academic. Colleagues Lorna Treanor and Pai Achtzehn have been researching diversity and inclusivity in entrepreneurship, and the findings are clear: "The take home message is that diversity leads to innovation," Mosey explains. Students who have lived experience of structural barriers - whether around gender, ethnicity or income - bring a different perspective to the problems they're trying to solve.

The Witty Entrepreneurship Scholarship, another HGI programme which supports students from low-income backgrounds to pursue launching their own ventures, is further proof. Many Witty scholars are women from ethnic minority backgrounds, often encouraged by families towards "safe" professional careers - only to encounter structural barriers.

"Entrepreneurship can be a way for them to use their lived experience and solve some of the barriers they face," Mosey says. "We're seeing them starting businesses to address social inequity, raising venture funding specifically for women or people from minority backgrounds, providing training and mentoring. But equally, they're joining the professions in innovation roles — trying to increase the diversity of the workforce."

YES's 30-year data tells a similar story: entrepreneurs from STEM backgrounds are becoming more diverse faster than STEM academia itself. At this year's 30th anniversary final, predominantly women-led Nottingham teams pitched ventures focused on women's health - in some cases backed by investment from women who had come through the programme years earlier. "The longer you do this," Mosey says proudly, "you get a snowball effect."

Thirty years of enterprise support at Nottingham suggests the effects of student entrepreneurship reach well beyond the ventures themselves. Not just the businesses and side hustles, but the careers, institutions and communities that Nottingham graduates go on to shape.