Student Entrepreneurs Commence Dedicated Accelerator Programme at UCD

The 2025 NovaUCD Student Enterprise Competition, an intensive 4-week accelerator programme for student entrepreneurs, which is now in its 11th year, has commenced today at University College Dublin (UCD) with 11 early-stage ventures and 22 participating students.

The participating ventures are focused on a wide range of business ideas including; sustainable agriculture, robotics, edtech, smart sensing systems for healthcare, sustainable fashion and music.

A €3k NovaUCD One to Watch Prize, sponsored by Terra Solar, is available for the overall winning venture at the end of this year’s competition.

The accelerator programme is run by NovaUCD, the innovation and start-up hub, as a framework to support UCD undergraduate and postgraduate students who want to work together to develop and grow start-up companies.

The aim of the accelerator is to assist the students in refining their start-up ideas through a series of structured workshops, including taught content from industry experts, interactive workshops, regular mentoring and pitching sessions.

Caroline Gill, Innovation Pathway Manager at NovaUCD who manages the competition said, “Over the next month we will be supporting the participating student entrepreneurs as they begin the process of accelerating their business ideas into early-stage start-ups. A key objective of this annual competition is to provide the students with the skills, the confidence, and the opportunity to further develop their ideas and hopefully in time launch their start-ups in Ireland and even internationally.”

The 4-week accelerator, which uses the Lean Startup and Business Model Canvas approach, includes a series of structured and interactive workshops delivered by Raomal Perera, Lean Disruptor. Topics such as, customer development; value proposition; working in teams; design thinking; prototyping, environment mapping; financial planning and effective fundraising and pitching, will be covered.

At a final workshop, to be held in late-June, the participating ventures will pitch to a judging panel. Based on the evaluation of the presentations an overall winner will be selected and will receive the €3k NovaUCD One to Watch Prize sponsored by Terra Solar.

At the end of the 2024 competition physiotherapists Rory Lambe and Ben O’Grady, both then masters students in the UCD School of Public Health, Physiotherapy and Sports Science, were announced as winners of the Tech Sustainability Prize. Clia, their early-stage venture, aims to make a meaningful difference to the lives of people with cardiovascular disease by combining clinical data with wearable technology to improve its management.

Rory is now a PhD student and earlier this year to further develop Clia he was one of several UCD students selected to participate in Conception X, a nine-month venture programme in London, focused on supporting PhD students from the UK and across Europe, to turn their research into deep tech start-ups.

Fourteen (14) postgraduate and 8 undergraduate students are participating on this year’s accelerator programme.

Over 80 early-stage ventures and some 200 students have completed NovaUCD Student Enterprise Competitions to date.