Innovative Ideas at the 2018 Parmee Prize

The 2018 Parmee Prize illustrated the breadth of innovative ideas being dreamt up by students at Pembroke.

Every year the Parmee Prize offers an opportunity for students of Pembroke to pitch their ideas to a panel of alumni judges. All applicants receive advice and mentoring, and the winning team gain £2,000 to get their business going. The entries this year were of an exceptionally high quality, and addressed some of the biggest challenges for society today.

The winning entry, ‘The Funding Line’, was presented by Carolyn Goddard (2017). Carolyn’s idea is targeted at small business-to-business limited companies facing capital shortages. She aims to create a transparent, simple, and safe model for invoice financing in an industry plagued by perception problems and a lack of regulation.

Although there was, of course, only one winner, all entries were of a very high standard. Xattery, represented by Linyuan Xin (2017), tackled the important issue of making electric batteries a feasible power source for long-distance travel. Their switching stations would cut out charging time for electric trucks and cars, instead simply replacing the battery in-situ. Hexagonfab, pitched by Ruizhi Wang (2014), proposes using graphene to create nanomaterial sensors for detecting allergens on food processing lines. Finally, Saif Ahmad (2013) and his team presented ‘Neutrocheck’, a simple, cost-effective device for testing neutrophil count in the blood of chemotherapy patients, without needing a time-consuming and expensive hospital visit.

The Parmee Prize is sponsored by Richard Parmee (1970), a William Pitt Fellow of Pembroke, and is also supported by the DG Marshall Trust. Thank you to all the participants for their excellent business ideas, and to the panel who had the difficult task of judging them.

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