Business School students set up market at Imperial

MBA students sold their wares at a pop-up market at Imperial yesterday, as part of a challenge designed to test business skills.

The students enticed other students, staff and the general public to buy their goods at the pop-up market on Queen’s Lawn. Several teams adopted a Halloween theme and wore fancy dress costumes to attract visitors to their stalls. Quirky products for sale included ‘missing eye’ contact lenses and Halloween face-painting kits and masks. Other stalls took a more technology focussed route, selling power banks for charging electronic devices and eco-friendly water bottles that easily fit into people’s pockets.  

The aim of the 360 Challenge is to help MBA students gain a 360 degree view of setting up a business, applying the theory learned on their MBA programme to help increase self-awareness and gain a better understanding of their abilities across core leadership areas.

Commenting on the challenge, MBA student Saleem Anwar said: “This challenge has been a great experience. It’s almost like a mini MBA in terms of getting you to apply the theory you learn in the classroom to a real business environment. It’s been great to work with new people and bring together everyone’s skills and ideas to create a fun pop-up market stall.  It’s been a real learning experience in deciding which products to choose for the stall and then seeing which ones have actually sold in reality. We were confident in choosing a Halloween theme which would appeal to students across the College and we’ve had a great reception from the College community.”

Earlier in the week, the nine student teams pitched their ideas to a panel of industry experts, who acted as investors, allocating budgets ranging from £200-£400 to enable the students to source and buy products for their market stall.

Reflecting on this year’s challenge, panellist Robert Harrold, a Co-Founder of WinstonCycles and an MBA alumnus from 2014, said: “This year’s challenge was very competitive and I was impressed by the high standard of the students’ pitches. The teams were all fully engaged in the process, from formulating their business ideas to delivering their pitches. The challenge really tests the key skills you learn in the early stages of the MBA, making you take your learnings from the classroom and applying them to a real life situation.”

 Fellow panellist Grant Williams, Co-Founder, PathPlanr, an MBA alumnus from 2013 said: “The challenge really takes students out of their comfort zones and we’ve seen some very creative business ideas being formulated in such a short timeframe. The timing of the event, being close to Halloween, has inspired several of the teams, but the product ideas are still feasible for a student pop-up market.”

At the end of the event, the profits made by each team will be added up and the winning group will be the one with the highest return on their investment. The winning team will be announced at the end of Friday 30 October. Their prize will be a dinner with Diane Morgan, Associate Dean of Programmes at Imperial College Business School, and a group of alumni.