We are delighted to introduce our inaugural Entrepreneurship Essay Competition. The purpose of the competition is to encourage UK Sixth Form students to pursue entrepreneurial aspirations and understand better how to launch an enterprise. We are particularly keen to foster this entrepreneurial spirit among students who might not traditionally consider entering the world of business and further hope this competition encourages more young people, who might not think about it, to apply to Oxbridge and Higher Education.

The competition is organised and run by the Entrepreneurship Lab (E-Lab) at King’s College, University of Cambridge. More details about the E-Lab can be found on our About page.

Students should choose between one of the three essays questions, below, exploring the importance of entrepreneurism and the challenges that business-people face. This essay should be written independently by the student but with input from a teacher or mentor. Students from all backgrounds and regardless of subjects studied are welcome to enter the competition.

A winner, and two runners up, will be selected by our expert panel of judges: Deborah Meaden (Business Leader and TV Dragon), Lord Mervyn King (former Governor of the Bank of England), and Gillian Tett (FT Columnist and Editor-at-Large of the Financial Times USA). The winners will be invited to a prize-giving ceremony, to be held in King’s College, Cambridge, on 9th December 2023. The winner will share a £1,000 cash prize, to be split equally between the candidate and their school, and two runners-up prizes of £500, again shared equally between the candidate and their school. The school portion of the prize will be issued in the form of book tokens.

Essay Questions and Format

Students are invited to select one of the three questions below, to write a 1,000 word essay:

Q1: Many businesses advertise themselves as ethical and sell environmentally friendly or ethically sourced goods. However, they often do this at a premium price. To some extent this is due to the higher price of their inputs but often they also enjoy a higher profit. To what extent is it ethical for a business to have excess profits from selling ethical goods?

Q2: Why is learning from failure sometimes more effective than learning from success? Build upon examples of entrepreneurs (in the broad sense of the term) who were able to learn from failure.

Q3: Generative AI technology, built upon Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT has allowed entrepreneurs to operate more efficiently. Discuss the impact of this technology for entrepreneurs and provide examples of how it is being used.

Any format of essay is permitted, this can range from a more academic article to a blog article to a journalistic business type article. If footnotes are used, they will count towards the word limit. External references should be sourced in a bibliography at the end of the article, which will not count towards the word limit. We know that not all students will be familiar with referencing, so you might find the following page from the University, which links to a Guide to Harvard Referencing, helpful. Any other standard system of referencing style is also acceptable.

Eligibility

Any student studying at a school or college in the United Kingdom who will be in academic year 12 or 13, or equivalent (S5 or S6 in Scotland; Year 13 or 14 in Northern Ireland) on the day of the deadline (26th September 2023) is eligible to enter the competition. There are no requirements on subjects studied.

The submitted essay must be the student’s own work but the student is allowed to seek input from a teacher or mentor. Use of generative AI is forbidden (e.g. ChatGPT, Bing AI and Google Bard). Plagiarism and AI-usage checks will be carried out and any violating essay will be disqualified. More details on the University’s plagiarism rules can be found here.

Competition entries will need to be approved by a teacher: students are required to obtain permission from a teacher (of any subject) to sponsor their application and provide an official (school) email address which they can be contacted upon to confirm the eligibility of the student (by 29th September). There are a maximum of 5 essay entries per school and students can only submit one essay each. If there are more than 5 students wishing to partake per school, the school should hold an internal competition to select the best essays.

Timeline

26th June 2023 - Competition Opens

9PM 26th September 2023 - Deadline for submission of essays (we are unable to consider essays submitted after the deadline)

9PM 29th September 2023 - Deadline for schools to confirm eligibility of students (we are unable to consider essays without confirmation of eligibility by this deadline)

End-November 2023 - Winners announced

December 2023 - Prize-giving Ceremony at King’s College, Cambridge

Submissions

The submission should not contain any personally identifiable information. Please enter personal details in the submission form (link below) and not in the essay.

Please ensure you have obtained permission from a teacher at your school to submit, in the submission form you will need to provide an official (school) email address that your teacher is reachable on. Once an essay has been submitted, it is not possible to edit or resubmit. 

The competition is free to enter. Please submit the essay as either a word or pdf document.

Any queries on the Essay Competition should be directed to Rhys Williams, entrepreneur@kings.cam.ac.uk

Essay submissions are closed. The data notice and terms and conditions can be found here.