Going for Gold

Hamza Siddiq represents Imperial College London at the Mayor of London's 'Going for Gold' event

Initially, when I received an invitation to the Mayor of London’s ‘Going for Gold’ event, I started to panic as I imagined delegates pole-vaulting over hurdles and being asked to hop, skip and jump their way to victory.

Just as I was mentally totting up the hours of training that would be needed at Ethos in order to secure Gold for Imperial, I looked more closely at the invite and was relieved to find that the event was actually part of the Mayor’s Business programme. This particular day was dedicated to highlighting the technology talent that we have here in London to a number of top executives from companies such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Cisco.

Imperial was invited to take part in the event, alongside UCL, in recognition of our strength in technological entrepreneurship and innovation. We were asked to invite some students and alumni who had started up their own businesses so that they could showcase their ideas to industry leaders. Among the Imperial representatives was MBA alumnus Bruce Hellman, CEO and co-founder of uMotif, an app designed to help people reach their goals in health, diet, fitness and well-being. Bruce was inspired to create a simple tracking app to measure how badly he was sleeping after the birth of his son (badly, but not as bad as he initially thought...). Indeed the concept was very well-received by a number of the big companies at the event, in particular Cisco.

Bruce together with Dr Alan Hartis - an MBA alumnus who is Director of Plumis Ltd, a company that looks at novel means of preventing fire in the home while still allowing for open spaces and attractive layouts – were then asked to take part in the PechaKucha presentations. For those of you not familiar with the Japanese style of presenting, speakers are given 20 seconds per slide in which to present to. There are 20 slides shown overall, so speakers only have six minutes, 40 seconds in total.

The Imperial students did very well and effectively pitched their businesses to the audience, who seemed engaged with the presentations and provided some insightful questions and suggestions.

I then gave an introduction to technology at Imperial and the vital role it has played throughout our history right up to present day with Imperial researchers working with the Great Britain rowing team to better understand how their bodies are moving and performing, so that they can improve their rowing techniques.

Throughout the day, I was particularly pleased to hear the students and alumni talking very positively about their time at Imperial both in their presentations and in discussions with industry leaders. It was fantastic to hear that they particularly valued the teaching and resources made available to them and cited them as crucial in allowing them to start up their own businesses.

As the day came to a close, some of the lucky few who had managed to get tickets to the Olympic gymnastics taking place in the O2 arena next door began to leave, while I stayed with the Imperial alumni to consider how their new industry contacts may help their businesses in the future...oh and whether we would see PechaKucha competitions in Rio 2016.

Hamza Siddiq is the MBA Programmes Manager at Imperial College Business School.

Find out more about the Imperial MBA.