Supporting business start-ups

Knowledge Exchange Framework perspective demonstrated: Skills, enterprise and entrepreneurship

Encouraging and supporting students and graduates

Kingston University is committed to encouraging and supporting students and graduates starting their own businesses or pursuing freelance or self-employed careers. The University takes pride in its incredibly entrepreneurial-minded student population. The University is ranked number one for graduate start-ups out of all higher education institutions in the UK in the 2020-21 Higher Education - Business and Community Interaction (HE-BCI) survey, supporting 298 graduate start-ups last year. Long held in high regard for its expertise in enterprise education, Kingston University is consistently ranked as having one of the highest number of graduate start-ups in the UK – a position it has maintained for the past decade.

Inside of Kingston Business School, with entrepreneurial students
Happy students on a business programme.

Pioneering education and entrepreneurship

Kingston University is a pioneer of enterprise education, through Kingston Business School, which has been supporting business start-ups for 40 years, and its Small Business Research Centre. In 2005, Kingston co-led a collaboration between seven London Universities to develop an Entrepreneurship Centre which pioneered authentic learning for entrepreneurship, and provided a catalyst for the University's growth and development in this area of learning.

Kingston embeds innovation, creative thinking and problem-solving into the curriculum across the university, with students on all courses able to access invaluable enterprise activities.

Enterprise Education Programmes

Kingston has established a number of popular enterprise programmes designed to help students learn the skills and develop the mindset needed to start up and run a successful business. These include:

Bright Ideas Competition

HackCentre

NEST and FastTrack Programmes

Success story: Neomi Bennett and 'Neo-slip'

Success story: Graduate Paule-Carine Dao and DaoLondon

Find out more about Enterprise Education

Find out more about Kingston University's Enterprise Education activities and how you can be involved.

Get in touch

Please contact us if you would like further information about knowledge exchange at Kingston University.

If you are interested in exploring collaborative opportunities and getting access to our academic expertise, student talent or unique facilities, please get in touch.