Sophie-Louise Hyde, founding member of In2Collision, explains why the business should win the Startup of the Year category of the Guardian Small Business Showcase competition:
Home to a number of innovative projects that will inspire creativity and community, In2Collision’s primary goal is to become the number one place for creative and corporate worlds to collide.
Through its dedicated online platform, In2Collision has begun to engage with both a young and/or creatively-conscious audience, selling its new, specially-designed, service packages to them worldwide.
Its micro-project, The Student Wordsmith, is already proving successful – as the first, award-winning, online writing and publishing platform in the UK that specialises in the work of emerging student and graduate writers. Engaging with over 2,000 potential and existing customers online so far, the company successfully made sales of £8,123 between 2015 and 2016.
During that year, the business strived to do things it had never done before, including launching its first Creative Writing journal, which is published quarterly. The Purple Breakfast Review has explored themes such as ‘People’ and ‘Echoes’ and included the work of over 80 contributors.
The company also ran its first corporate workshops on ‘Creative Thinking’ and ‘High Performance Teamwork’. In partnership with Anglian Water, Lane 4 and Loughborough University, we successfully helped senior management teams think creatively and identify how they could work more successfully as a team in their daily practice.
Since September 2015, we’ve seen over 18 employees, students and graduates come through our doors for internships or shorter periods of work experience. Their involvement and passion in the last six months has truly been the key to our recent success.
All entries which meet the competition criteria are published and our judging panel select a shortlist of the top three for each category. Winners are announced at an awards ceremony in summer 2016.
