Entrepreneurship at BCU
At Birmingham City University, we're committed to helping entrepreneurial students achieve their full potential. Our innovative environment and employability services mean we have the highest number of student and graduate business start-ups of any university in the West Midlands (HESA, 2022).
STEAMhouse
Our STEAMhouse Business Incubator provides information, support and a base for students, graduates and local entrepreneurs setting up their own businesses. The STEAMhouse building features a range of co-working, artist production, incubation and networking facilities that will allow you to learn alongside businesses, take part in real industry-based projects and develop your entrepreneurship skills.
BSEEN
We participate in BSEEN, a regional entrepreneurship scheme for students and graduates. If you're an aspiring entrepreneur, BSEEN could provide a 12-month start-up package to turn your business idea into reality.
BCU's entrepreneurs
We have a confident, proud and diverse community of students at BCU, many of whom have started successful businesses. Discover just some of their stories here.
Bami: At the start of my journey I didn't think it would be possible to help as many people as I have. If you continually take one little step towards where you want to get to the destination may seem far away but you're constantly making progress. my name is Bami Popoola and I am the CEO and co-founder of Vergroot Development Limited
[Music] I came into BCU as a computer networks and security student for my bachelors and I really started this degree because I wanted to go into cyber security at the time and having taught across different universities, I found BCU to be the best choice and I moved on to doing a masters in cyber security, which I recently just completed in January. So, now I'm ready to fully focus on work [laughs]. Currently, we're hybrid working and why STEAMhouse is very very important is a lot of the time we need to come into the city, we have several meetings with clients and previously you would always be struggling and moving around, where am I going to meet with a client? And this sort of provides a nice central base that we know whenever we have in-person meetings or we're with partners or with clients, we've got a place we can do it and we've got a place we can interact with several people as well.
Vergroot in the UK, Vergoot Development was started as an R&D house and what the growth really looks like, going into the future is we will have a Consortium of different companies that each are operating within their own spaces all focused around providing this avenue of businesses that we can automatically plug the network into and that's the most important part.
My best advice to students looking to start their business is to learn how to interact with people, people are the most important aspect of your business.
[Music]
Bami's entrepreneurship story
Bami Popoola, a BCU Graduate has successfully started his own Tech business, 'Vergroot Tech'. Bami started at BCU studying BSc Cyber Security before moving on to a master's degree, also in Cyber Security. With the support of STEAMhouse, BSEEN and BCU, Bami was able to successfully grow his business which has now scaled to operate globally.
Shovon Wiggan
Business Management graduate Shovon founded her own business called Inspire-a-Doll. Shovon's multicultural dolls aim to bring more representation to the toy industry.
“STEAMhouse gave me the confidence to reach out to manufacturers, helped me with branding and provided me with an office space to build my business.”
Pravjoth Gill
Pravjoth always knew she wanted to start her own business. Since joining BCU, she’s created her own company and produced two podcasts.
“I received mentoring through the BSEEN program which encouraged me to start my own fitness and nutrition company, tailored to people with disabilities and medical conditions. The program’s support gave me the confidence and business skills to set up a business that matters to me.”