The Innovation in Business Centre at GMIT has once again launched the GMIT Student Innovation Awards. The Student Innovation Awards has been running at the GMIT Mayo Campus for the last seven years and due to its success, a decision has been made to roll it out across the wider GMIT campus. The competition gives students a unique opportunity to test their creative business ideas and win a share of the prize money worth €2,000 sponsored by Shell and GMIT.

Examples of previous winners include an innovative therapeutic recreational service for teenagers, a detection device to help keep children safe, an outdoor surfing magazine and last year's winners' ‘'Lollicakes,’' an innovative healthy confectionary.

Maria Staunton, Manager of the Innovation in Business Centre (IiBC) at GMIT Castlebar, is delighted to roll out the awards for the wider GMIT campus, ‘This will mean students at GMIT will have the opportunity to test their entrepreneurial skills, explore their ideas to see if they have commercial potential. I am delighted that the rest of the GMIT will also now be competing as this shows a real commitment from the College in supporting entrepreneurship. This year should provide a great selection of ideas, and each year the Awards prove that there are many enthusiastic innovative young individuals in GMIT. Some of the finalists from previous years have even gone on to set up new businesses.”

How to enter:

Are you a student of GMIT and think you’ve got what it takes to pitch your idea to our judges? Are you a lecturer who knows someone or believes that a team of your students could steal the prize?

To download our application form please click here.

By going through the process of coming up with an innovative idea in the GMIT Student Innovation Awards, you can then go on (if you choose) to try to win bigger money from Enterprise Ireland. The Enterprise Ireland’s ‘Think Outside the Box’ awards is a competition for third level students across Ireland. We will be telling you more about these awards when they are launched at the end of October 2013.