Venture Crawl is the day when the entrepreneurial ecosystem meets the talent nurtured by universities. We have seen the event grow year on year and are incredibly proud the collaboration that makes this event one of the highlights of the year.
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Venture Crawl online is free for your university to join. Staff from founding Venture Crawl London universities work behind the scenes to get it set up so enterprising students around the world can have access to great entrepreneurial content and connect with other.
All you have to do in return is provide a minimum of 1 hours worth of content to add to the map and/or live programme. Instructions on how to send your content to us to confirm your place will be emailed to you when you register your university.
The agenda for the day will be:
9:00 - 9:30 - Welcome and Keynote Speaker
9:30 - 13:00 - Venture Crawl Map and Live Programme
13:00 - 14:00 - Lunch and Networking
14:00 - 18:00 - Exploring the Map and Live Programme Continue
18:00 - 20:00 - Live Pitch Off!
One of the advantages of Venture Crawl Online is that students can dip in and out of sessions throughout the day or stay from start to finish!
We’re looking for content to add to the Venture Crawl map that students can navigate around throughout the day, tailoring their experience to their specific interests.
All content on The Map will be pre-recorded and can be sessions you’ve previously recorded or content that you would like to produce between now and the event.
The Live Programme are opportunities for you to offer live webinars on a particular topic.
You can do one, other or a mixture of both, we just need a minimum of 1 hours' worth of content from each participating university.
We have six themes that the content should be linked to:
The Start Up Journey
Sustainability
Acceleration and Investment
Social Enterprise and Impact
Digital and technology
Entrepreneurial Skills
The values of Venture Crawl are incredibly important to us and we are therefore looking for content that:
Work in collaboration with partners from the Entrepreneurial Eco System
We may not be able to visit them in person this year, but Venture Crawl is all about the students getting an insight into the eco system. In the past we have visited Google, Octopus Ventures, Plexal, WeWork to name a few… so who can you work with? Co-working spaces, accelerators, investment houses, corporates known for innovation, join forces with another university to create something – the options are endless!
Are JEDIs
We are committed to Justice, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and want to ensure this is embedded across the sessions for Venture Crawl this year. The Entrepreneurial landscape is vast – let’s make sure we represent this.
Will be fun and engaging
The students have enough lectures. Let’s make sure our sessions stand out as much as possible!
You can design your session however you’d like but some formats that may work well could be:
- Panels or interesting spearkers with Q+A (make it interactive rather than a lecture)
- Masterclasses
- Demos/tours of spaces (*only where this can be done safely and in line with government guidelines!)
- Interviews
Some great examples from last year are:
University of Loughborough London did a live tour around Here East Innovation Spaces
2022 Pitch Process
All Venture Crawl Participating Universities have the chance to select one Student/Graduate representative to enter the Venture Crawl Pitching Competition.
Stage 1: Universities select their champion and submit a recording.
Stage 2: A panel of impartial judges review recordings and select the top 10.
Stage 3: Top 10 battle it out ‘live’ at Venture Crawl to be crowned Venture Crawl champion.
More details per stage:
Stage 1: In advance of Venture Crawl on the 9th of March, each University through a democratic process, will select one person per university they would like to represent them at the final in the Venture Crawl Pitch Off evening event. And each pitcher will pre-record their pitch to enter into Stage 2.
What to submit: Pre-recorded 90 second business pitch hosted on a public link for the panel to be able to access it (eg. Unlisted or password protected on YouTube ). Please note, details of where to submit will be emailed to you upon signing your university up to take part in Venture Crawl 2022.
Deadline Friday 25th February at 5pm GMT
Stage 2: In advance of the Venture Crawl on the 9th of March, a panel of impartial judges will review all university pitches and select the 10 best to battle it out at the big pitch off on the day of Venture Crawl.
Stage 3: The 10 best pitches will deliver their 90 second pitch ‘Live’ at the final event, this will be online and all pitchers will be given instructions once selected.
Here is an information one pager you can share with your students, which also contains more guidance on what the pitch should include along with the judging criteria:
When you register you will be emailed the submission links for your content.
If you have more than one piece of content, you will need to complete the form for each piece of content you are contributing.
You will enter both content for The Map or for the Live Programme through the same form - there's options for both.
For pre-recorded content going on The Map you need to host this somewhere online e.g. YouTube, Vimeo etc. and we just need the link from you. So this needs to be hosted somewhere that's open access online. We cannot upload content for you. We also need you to add a location for this content for the pin on the map - so if you've partnered with a company, the address of their headquarters for example. This will help students to explore the ecosystem.
For Live Programme sessions you will need to host them yourselves on whichever platform you prefer (Teams, Zoom etc.) You'll need to provide us with the link and any passcodes so that we can add these to the schedule for students to access when you complete the form. Sessions should be 50 minutes long, starting on the hour - we'll ask you what time you'd like to run your session in the form.
Once we've received your content contributions we will send you drafts of two emails that you will need to send on to your participating students. One that should be sent about a week in advance letting them know how the whole day is going to work and secondly an email that should be sent at 9am on the morning of the event that contains the password they need to access The Map and the Live Content. Then they will be free to explore the sessions at their leisure!

