MPhil student Shufaa Hame’s start-up, ‘Kuwiswe’, aims to bring ethically created African-made products to global customers and to tackle the exploitation of the continent as only a source of raw materials. Kuwiswe acts as an online platform that connects African-owned businesses with a global market and, also, as a call to rethink people’s mindsets when it comes to the purchases they make. Its goal is two-fold: to celebrate the quality and artistic value of Tanzania and the continent, and to actively foster conscious consumers. Read more about Shufaa’s inspiration for her social venture Kuwiswe here.

In 2024, the E-Lab ran the second edition of our Entrepreneurship Essay Competition. The purpose of the competition is to encourage UK-based school students to pursue entrepreneurial aspirations and understand better how to launch an enterprise. The students choose between three essay questions which reflects the importance of entrepreneurism and the challenges that businesses face. This week, we share the essay of runner up, Keon Robert from Queen Elizabeth's School, Barnet, who explains how Grameen Bank in Bangladesh embodies the essence of sustainable and successful social enterprise.

Social enterprises face unique challenges when it comes to measuring impact. Distinct from traditional business models, these organisations are driven by the aim to create meaningful and sustainable difference in the lives of their beneficiaries. These kinds of impact can be far more intangible than that which constitutes usual business metrics. As a consequence, innovative approaches to measure and understand impact are often required. Noise Solution, a music mentoring programme for at-risk youth, provides just such an example of this. Simon Glenister, the founder of Noise Solution and panellist from the our Catalysts for Change event, shares his insights of their approach.

On the 23rd of November, we celebrated the second year of our E-Lab Entrepreneurship Essay Competition and announced the 2024 Winners at an Awards Ceremony in King’s College. The essay competition serves to foster entrepreneurial mindsets in young students and to encourage them to engage with innovative thinking. This year we welcomed over 200 entries from across 130 schools and asked the students to grapple with important questions facing those interested in entrepreneurship today. In this post, our Senior Associate Rhys Williams explains the value of the competition, the themes of this year’s essay questions, and the strategies employed by our three winners.

In September 2024, the King’s E-Lab welcomed its fourth cohort for its yearly residential programme. The residential week, which included participation from 7 Cambridge Colleges, brought together undergraduates and graduates from a range of disciplines who are eager to explore the potential of entrepreneurship for their endeavours. Jin Chen, 3^rd year art historian from Murray Edwards College unpacks her experience of the week, from interdisciplinary insights to creative collaborations.

Economics is an important part of the academic community at King’s College. The College has a yearly intake of around 35-40 economics students, both undergraduate and graduate, and the largest Fellowship in Cambridge in terms of economics. Recently, King’s MBA student Elliot Fournet attended a day with Lord Mervyn King alongside other King’s economics students, past and present, to reflect on the place, potential and future of economic knowledge in academia and beyond. Read more about the day from him here.

On the 17^th October 2024, the King’s E-Lab hosted David Roux, co-founder and co-managing partner of BayPine Capital, in conversation with King’s College Provost, Gillian Tett. Read Jigar Patel’s reflection on a night of insight, anecdotes and wise words for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Timothy P. A. Cooper’s book Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace is an account of over a year of embedded research in the largest electronics market in Pakistan. Once the centre of film and media piracy in South Asia, it now specialises in smartphones and accessories. For Hall Road’s traders, conflicts between the economic promises and the moral dangers of film loom large. At once a vivid ethnography of a market street and a generative theorization of atmosphere, this book offers fresh perspectives on moral experience and the relationship between religion, media, and economic life.

Where law meets innovation—Hamza Aslam delves into the future of law as AI takes centre stage, exploring the transformative power of generative AI in legal practice.

In September 2024, the King’s E-Lab welcomed its fourth cohort of residential students for the 2024/5 academic year. The cohort included a mix of graduates and undergraduates from a wide range of academic fields. Eva Lemmy, an English undergraduate, reflects on her experience during the residential week and the potential of programmes like it to bridge important gaps between the arts and business.

Team JudgeMentor participated in the King's Entrepreneurship Lab's inaugural LLM X Law Hackathon on 23^rd June, an event inspired by the well-established CodeX initiative at Stanford University. Read more about their experience and inspiration for developing a scalable machine-learning tool that focuses on overlooked linguistic and conceptual information for analysing different judges’ legal ‘personalities’.

Discovery AI is a tool that helps SMBs solve smaller disputes, such as a non-payment disputes, that typically go unsolved. It works by allowing these SMBs to upload all of their case data into the platform and then performing an in-depth analysis of the evidence. It has a chat feature to assist with further querying and it ultimately helps to understand the win chances. Finally it includes a cost estimation feature and, if the SMB decides to take the case further, it connects them to a lawyer. Discovery AI has the ability to bridge the gap between SMBs and lawyers to help them recover the huge amount of money lost annually due to legal issues. The solution can be expanded to further reduce the equal justice gap by including refugees seeking asylum and other minorities.

The Cambridge University Entrepreneurs (CUE) is the University’s oldest entrepreneurship society. On the 26^th of April 2024, in collaboration with the King’s E-Lab, they hosted their annual pitch competition. A demonstration of innovative thinking, interdisciplinary engagement and world-changing ideas characterised the day. Read more about it from the President of the society here.

Companies spend millions carefully negotiating contracts with their suppliers, only to realise that their legal and procurement teams lack the time and resources to enforce the execution of the majority of the "long-tail" of supply contract terms. Inadequacies in management systems results in supply chain disruption and subsequent litigation costs which are passed on to consumers. Nasir.AI has launched its agentic LLM-powered supplier contract management to tackle this problem (worth more than 1.4 billion USD in Europe alone). Using a two-stage generative AI pipeline, Nasir.AI identifies the contract terms, writes executable code to monitor their completion, and autonomously notifies relevant stakeholders. This approach to supplier contract management improves contract monitoring, empowers procurement teams, and helps prevent supply chain disruption.