This season’s Entrepreneurship Guest Lecture Series started off with Charles Armstrong, founder and CEO of Trampoline Systems LTD. UCL Classics student Carolina Mostert summarises the talk below.

Trampoline Systems LTD – Background

After studying Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge, Charles was mentored by one of Britain’s greatest architects, Lord Young of Dartington. At present, he can boast “lots of different hats”: alongside Trampoline Systems LTD, he also directs The Trampery, East London’s premier co-working and events space, and One Click Orgs, an open-source project which in March 2011 launched the world’s first platform for virtual organisations. In his own words, he was an entrepreneur since he was “a little kiddy”: at the age of seven he made his first business by renting out his eraser to his school peers. “That was the first thing I remember doing that smells of entrepreneurship”, he says.

Charles’s very first career had to do with music. He used to run different bands and work with the social entrepreneur Michael Young in the 1940s. Together, they set up a school for social entrepreneurs: “I can’t help myself from setting things up”, Charles explained. Charles’s social entrepreneurship, or “social brain” as he likes to say, was the starting point for his biggest project, Trampoline Systems, created with a friend from Cambridge. After spending time on the island of St Pancreas, whose population numbered about 80 people in total, Charles was convinced of how effective the decision-making system of tiny communities was. He therefore tried to recreate it in the larger community in which he lived. Thus, Trampoline Systems LTD came about: a software developer which specialises in analyzing large-scale social networks. One of the first main goals of Trampoline Systems was to waste as little time as possible. For instance, corporate articles are rewritten in a digital way that is acceptable to the government: by using machines, it cuts on bureaucratic time-consuming actions.

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Award ceremonies tend to be mainly of interest to recipients and their families, but for me the UCL Awards for Enterprise Awards – held on 15 May in the UCL Bloomsbury Theatre by UCL Advances – was an informative experience, enlightening me as to the rich diversity of UCL entrepreneurial engagement.

As Professor Richard Catlow (Dean of Mathematical & Physical Sciences) put it, it is assumed that most entrepreneurs come from computer science and engineering departments. However, there were nominations from across the board from UCL Arts and Humanities, the Bartlett, Mathematical & Physical Sciences and Laws.

Watch a video about how UCL has championed enterprise in London throughout its history:

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Cakes, elderly care, opinion polling and a popular restaurant chain may at first glance appear entirely unrelated. In fact, they are all extremely successful ventures that were instigated by the entrepreneurial UCL alumni who were on the panel for last Wednesday night’s CASE Circle of Excellence alumni professional networking event. UCL students Ben Wakeham, 3rd year BA Philosophy and Economics and Tom Palmer, 3rd year BSc Economics report on the event.

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This week’s ‘Entrepreneurship Guest Lecture Series’ talk was given by UCL alumnus Jogesh Limbani, Head of Open Innovation at Orange Labs UK in Chiswick, West London. UCL students Mansour Abdulghaffar and Carolina Mostert summarise his lecture below.

Jogesh’s background
Limbani completed a BEng in Software Engineering at the University of Sheffield and an MSc in Telecommunications at UCL. He recently returned to UCL for an EngD in the field of communications.

After joining Orange in 2002, Limbani held seven positions within his first three years. Among those, he started off as software developer and then became project manager for a team of seventeen people. He then became the labs’ Head of Research and is now Head of Innovation, the first holder of this title within Orange.

Watch the full lecture below

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