UCL Classics student Carolina Mostert summarises the talk below.

Dale Murray’s story is impressive. It begins with a girl leaving home at the age of 16 and starting on an internship program at Price Waterhouse, a top accountancy firm. “To be an accountant, to have a job, a suit and a briefcase” was what she wanted as a young teenager and each of these she got.

After six years, in her early twenties, and with a professional qualification in her hands, Dale moved into commerce. She joined what was to be New Zealand’s best start-up, Vodafone New Zealand, taking it to full commercial launch in 1993. Dale was part of the start-up management team: it was this experience that taught her how businesses are built.

She came to the UK knowing she “wanted to be an entrepreneur”. She enrolled in an MBA course at London Business School, dreaming about the business she would have launched at the end of her course. Clear in her mind was that there was going to be a business, but “what that business would be, I had no idea”.

The stroke of luck came in the late 1990s, when Dale’s boyfriend – now husband – joined the Orange team. In these very years, there was a real ‘boom’ of pre-paid phones, a market that attracted about 10 million customers. It was then that Dale spotted the problem that led her to success.

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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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