How To Become The Next Shell Livewire Young Entrepreneur Of The Year

With only 4 days remaining until we complete our Hot 48 shortlist of winners who will go on to compete for our annual Shell LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year award, there has never been a better time to apply for the Grand Ideas Awards!

So how do you make it on to the shortlist?

The Hot 48 shortlist is made up of the year’s Grand Ideas Award winners, an awards scheme that gives four £1000 prizes to the month’s best and brightest business ideas. Applications are completed online and the deadline is the last day of every month. The competition is open to 16-30 year old entrepreneurs whose businesses are pre-start or up to a year old. Past winners of this award include such innovative businesses as Pavegen, The *TeaShed, SQR Systems, and Speakset. The full list of past winners can be found in the Alumni section of our website.

Once the deadline for each month has passed, the applications are sifted by the Shell LiveWIRE team to produce a shortlist of 10, who will then produce elevator pitch videos for the website. These ten businesses will then be judged by an external judging panel, with the Shell LiveWIRE community also weighing into the judging by voting for their favourite elevator pitch video. You can check out the businesses currently competing for an award and vote for your favourite now.

Though the bulk of the scoring rests with the external judges (who score the businesses across 10 criteria, each with a maximum of 10 points, giving a maximum overall score of 100 for each business), the elevator pitch that receives the most votes will get an additional 10 points added to their score, with the second highest getting nine points, and so forth.

The top four scoring businesses each month are added to our Hot 48 shortlist and are then judged in panels, which will eventually give us the Final 8 business who will vie for the Shell LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, and all the funding, PR and prestige that comes with it.

This infographic will tell you all you need to know about the awards process.

The announcement of the winner will take place in London on 21 November 2013, following a day of inspirational talks, workshops and networking opportunities at our Shell LiveWIRE LIVE! event. Registration for this event will open in September so be sure to save the date!

Why not hear what some of our past winners have to say about the awards and how it helped their businesses:

Ready to kick-start your business idea? Apply for a Shell LiveWIRE Grand Ideas Award now!

Source: shell-livewire.org