Gain key entrepreneurial skills and start testing your ideas with potential customers and stakeholders in five virtual training sessions.

ARC Launch consists of four virtual workshops and one presentation, which are designed to help you gain key entrepreneurial skills and explore financially sustainable models for generating impact at scale.

You also get the chance to test your idea with potential customers and external stakeholders and receive expert feedback that will help inform the next steps to progress your idea. For example, this could be participation in an accelerator, collaborative research, forming a consultancy, offering licensing, or developing a social enterprise or for-profit venture.

After attending ARC Launch, you will be in an excellent position to apply to ARC Accelerate, our 6-month accelerator programme with time buyout. 

ARC Launch offers a cohort-based learning environment with peer support from like-minded researchers and additional help from industry experts and Technology Transfer Officers (TTOs).

Cohorts run every few months, and a list of upcoming sessions can be found below. The training is led by Dr Dave Jarman and coordinated by Dr James Woodhams. A TTO or equivalent commercialisation representative should attend the training sessions alongside participants for support.

The application is short and intended to help us understand your idea better. We want to know what stage you are at, who your project’s stakeholders are, how you imagine your project could have further impact at scale and how you think the programme could help you achieve this aim.

• Use this template to prepare your answers
• Submit your application here

We will ask you to answer the following four questions:

• What is your project/venture proposal?
• Who are the various stakeholders of your project? Please outline the (potential) beneficiaries, users and customers*
• What is your idea for increasing the scale or sustainability of your project’s impact?
• What are you looking to gain from the ARC Launch programme?

We are not looking for specific answers or types of ideas! You also don’t need to know all the details yet as the programme is designed to help you figure those out. In fact, it is likely that your idea and your plan on how to progress the idea to the next stage will change during the programme.

*The application form provides additional guidance on how to answer this question and the topic is also covered in detail during ARC Discover.