London Met’s Big Idea Challenge continues to grow across all stages of the competition.
Date: 10 March 2026
The Big Idea Challenge, led by our Enterprise team, received 83 entries this year – a 58% increase from last year. After pitching to the Enterprise team, 24 ideas have progressed to the finals, making this the competition’s biggest since its launch in 2014.
This increase in entries and finalists reflects the growing entrepreneurial ambition within our community at London Met, and our Enterprise team’s goal to support more students and recent graduates in building innovative, creative and socially driven business ventures.
The Bootcamp Day
More than 50 students and recent graduates joined the recent Big Idea Challenge bootcamp day, a high-energy daylong workshop designed to help participants refine their business concepts and strengthen their pitching skills.
Jon Everitt, London Met’s Student Enterprise Practitioner, says: “We were blown away by the high standard of ideas this year, with some really strong entries coming through the Big Idea Challenge. It was fantastic to host London Met’s biggest ever Bootcamp Day and to see so many participants getting involved and developing their pitches.”
The Pitch Days
Across three days of pitching, 42 entrants presented ideas spanning health, culture and technology – from gut-friendly fermented drinks and personalised hormone-tracking services to initiatives celebrating underrepresented communities and immersive light-and-sound wellbeing experiences.
After the pitching days, our Enterprise team selected 24 finalists, with eight in each category: Commercial, Creative and Freelance, and Social Impact. The finalists will present to a new judging panel in a few weeks, who will decide this year’s winners and runners-up and select the 2026 Big Idea Challenge Grand Champion.
Among the new judges is Neal Bamford, Lead Data Specialist at Mercator Digital and London Met Data Analytics MSc graduate, whose experience in data strategy and digital transformation will help assess the scalability and technical strength of finalist ideas.
