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It’s Global Entrepreneurship Week at Cranfield!

Global Entrepreneurship Week got off to a flying start at Cranfield on Monday 13 November. The Bettany Centre hosted not one, not two, not three, but four business founders who joined us to tell their stories and answer some critical questions faced by every entrepreneur when they start their journey.

To stress just how seriously Cranfield takes new business creation, the panel session was introduced by Professor Sean Tyrrel, Pro Vice Chancellor of Education. He explained how the university offers a programme of ideation and business formation that supplements our taught and research courses and is available, free of charge, across the campus through the academic year. Bettany Centre Director Professor Steffi Hussels followed up by explaining exactly what was on offer. In recent years, the Centre has provided seed funding for a dozen start-ups, which has enabled would-be entrepreneurs to take their ventures to the point of commercialisation.

Proof of cross-campus collaboration and support was provided in the form of our panel members. Two were drawn from Cranfield’s aerospace programmes, and two from the School of Management. On the aerospace side were Ziad Jreijiri, founder of Oreyeon, who joined us remotely from Dubai, and Aqeel Shamsul, CEO of Frontier Space Technologies Ltd, who was present in person. Dan George, founder of StepEx, was also with us on the night, and Chenali Bisen, the driving force behind Innovious, called in from India. Each introduced their business:

• Oreyeon uses state-of-the-art image capture to detect foreign object debris, damage to runway surfaces and vegetation growth that could threaten airport flight operations. The business emerged from work undertaken on Ziad’s Cranfield Masters programme in 2014.
• Frontier Space Technologies, which benefited from Cranfield seed funding, enables medical research to be conducted in outer space, where gravity is greatly reduced, to develop new therapies for conditions such as bone density loss and muscle atrophy. This business likewise arose from research at Cranfield.
• StepEx addresses the problem faced by many students of funding their higher education aspirations. Many conventional lenders will not help, but the StepEx model allows students to finance their courses by taking a percentage of their future earnings. The business was created some years after Dan completed his MBA.
• Innovious has been started while Chenali is still completing her MSc at Cranfield. The company specialises in creating sustainable single-use packaging materials for the fashion industry. Following its participation as a finalist in the prestigious global HULT business competition, Innovious secured $100,000 of early-stage funding.

The industries the four businesses operate in are highly diverse, and the stage of the companies varies from start-up to full market presence, but they share similarities. They all operate in significant sectors with global potential to scale. Ziad, for example, estimates that the cost to the aerospace industry worldwide of delays caused by obstructed runways is £20 bn. Tens of thousands of students from poorer backgrounds cannot realise their potential. Medicine desperately needs new and better therapies that Aqeel’s “Lab in a box” can provide, and the pressure is on the global fashion industry to improve its sustainability performance.

To each of the four panellists, Steffi posed some of the key questions which face the rising generation of new business founders:

Before you went to market, how did you validate the idea?

For Dan, the answer was simple. He knew the problem first-hand. Only by securing a scholarship was he able to enrol on his MBA. Banks were not interested. Many others, he concluded, must be in the same position. For both Ziad and Aqeel, their Cranfield studies had given them deep insight into the aerospace industry and unearthed opportunities that novel technologies could solve. Chenali and her team on the MSc in Management and Entrepreneurship brainstormed several ideas before homing in on the fashion sector as an industry with big sustainability problems to address. The team also spent considerable time talking to big fashion brands and their suppliers to drill down into the practicalities of providing a better solution.

Acquiring that first customer is usually really tough. How did you gain market traction?

Innovious has yet to start trading, but Chenali has already obtained Letters of Intent from several potential customers. When Innovious is ready to come to market, these brands are prepared to buy. For Ziad and Aqeel, their immersion in the aerospace industry and the networks they have acquired over time have proved vital. In Ziad’s case, Covid-19 put a brake on his plans, which compounded the aerospace sector’s innate conservatism towards radical innovation. However, it had an upside in that Oreyeon focused on the military sector, which continued to spend and had a real and present need to solve the runway blockage problem. Aqeel’s market is tightly defined, which has helped with his targeting of potential customers. In Dan’s case, once he had overcome significant regulatory hurdles, there was huge interest from the university sector when he showcased StepEx, but there was an understandable reluctance to be the first to sign up. An unexpected break came in the form of an IT boot camp client. Their endorsement opened the door to others

How did you secure funding?

In Dan’s view, a founder has no choice but to bootstrap the business in the early days. Money comes with success, once you have a successful business proposition to present. Ziad and Aqeel agree that it continues to be tough, although Ziad has benefited from a US Department of Defense procurement program and Aqeel has been helped by partnering with a big player. For Chenali that award of $100,000 has provided both working capital and a huge boost to the credibility of Innovious in the search for the next round of funding – also helped by those Letters of Intent.

And what else…?

Some other important success factors emerged during the evening. Dan was accompanied by his CFO and former Cranfield classmate, Leo Della-Moretta, who provided an employee’s perspective. Leo pointed out that someone who joins an entrepreneurial venture has to believe in the vision painted by the founder of what the business will become, not what it is at the point of joining. Conversely, the founder has to believe that early hires will do whatever it takes to make the business a success.

Dan has also made a habit of updating potential founders on the progress of StepEx long before approaching them for money. “You need to build relationships well in advance,” he says. “Make sure you’re on the radar, and that you’re in control of the narrative.”

Pay close attention to shareholdings, especially for businesses with multiple founders. Shares are more easily give out than taken back, as Steffi pointed out, and many businesses have come to regret the lack of a robust shareholders’ agreement. Frontier Space Technologies started out with seven people and that number has now reduced to four: Aqeel says that it was not a problem because shares were not allocated at the outset.

To find out more about our panellists’ businesses, visit: