On June 23rd it was announced that a 3-student team from UCD Formula Student (UCDFS) are the overall winners of the 2020 NovaUCD Student Enterprise Competition, along with a €5,000 cash prize. The team won with their start-up enterprise Formula Training, a recently established online training platform for global Formula Student teams.
The 3-student team from UCDFS composed of engineering students Peter Gately, Kelly Kaulsay and Scott Mulligan won with their start-up online training platform aiming to teach other Formula Student teams what is needed to compete in the annual Formula Student competition at the UK-based Silverstone Circuit. UCDFS is a team of more than 50 engineering and business students who work to build an electric Formula-1 style car to compete in this annual competition which is organized by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers.
According to Gately there is “no formally established product or service available to help teams train new recruits”. The platform will aim to fill this gap in the market with video lectures and written resources to help teams prepare for the competition. The team noted that the prize will allow them to expand the platform with more video content. With the Formula Student Competition in Silverstone now cancelled due to COVID-19, the wider UCDFS team are “now focused on working on our entry for next year’s competition.”
The competition run by NovaUCD, UCD’s centre for New Ventures and Entrepreneurs, aims to assist students in their start-up ventures by providing workshops and mentoring. While UCDFS won first place overall, two other participating ventures, Uni21 and Daysier, won second and third place respectively and received €3,000 and €2,000 cash prizes. The Uni21 team entered with a study app in development that forms multiple choice questions from lecture materials and allows competition between classmates. Daysier’s venture consists of an app to provide remote workers with personalized schedules, taking work styles and workload into account.
The NovaUCD Mentoring Programme and Student Enterprise Competition had 12 early stage ventures participating remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Each of the 9 other early-stage ventures will receive a €1,000 cash prize for completing the programme. Tom Flanagan, the UCD Director of Enterprise and Commercialisation in NovaUCD congratulated the winners: “I would like to congratulate the UCD Formula Student team on winning the 2020 NovaUCD Student Enterprise Competition and I would like to commend all the students who participated in the programme.”
Ann Jaffray – Reporter
