News and insights

Charity Camfed, which partners with the Wo+Men’s Leadership Centre at Cambridge Judge Business School, wins Social Enterprise award for its work to prevent child marriage in sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge-based charity Camfed, which partners with the Wo+Men’s Leadership Centre at Cambridge Judge Business School to help end child marriage in sub-Saharan Africa, was named winner of the Kate Gross Prize for Social Enterprise at the Business Weekly Awards on 21 March. “Camfed is transforming the lives of young girls in rural Africa, who then bring lasting change to their communities. This work really is game changing," said Tony Quested, owner of Business Weekly. Camfed’s UK Aid Match Appeal (CAMA), launched in partnership with the UK Department for International Development (DFID), has raised awareness of the issue of child marriage in sub-Saharan Africa. The campaign identifies girls who are vulnerable to early marriage, then supports these girls to stay in school through work with families and local authorities. The CAMA campaign raised £2.78 million in private donations and matching DFID contributions. “The real praise must go to our inspiring CAMA network, made up of social entrepreneurs and philanthropists, whose energy, passion and generosity is keeping girls in education and creating a wave…

Zuzanna Brzosko, CEO of Sixfold Bioscience, has been nominated for a 2017 Women of the Future Award in the field of Science. Sixfold Bioscience, one of the ventures in Cambridge Judge Business School's Accelerate Cambridge programme, is a biotech company specialising in the delivery of therapeutics with RNA nanoparticles, whose aim is to achieve safe and effective delivery of cancer treatments. Zuzanna received her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Cambridge, where she was also a former president of Cambridge University Entrepreneurs, and took part in the School's Management of Technology & Innovation (MoTI) programme. The Women of the Future Awards, founded by Pinky Lilani CBE DL in 2006, were conceived to provide a platform for the pipeline of female talent in the UK. Through the Women of the Future Programme, they have built a remarkable, informal community of influential women determined not only to build fruitful professional and personal relationships with one another, but to be advocates for an exciting new generation of business talent.…

Cambridge MBA graduate Harshitha Balini is shortlisted for the Women of the Future Awards. Harshitha Balini, a Cambridge MBA graduate (MBA 2016), has been shortlisted in the Women of the Future Awards that recognise female talent in the UK. Harshitha is one of five women finalists in the "MBA Star" category of the awards. The awards, in association with insurer Aviva, were founded in 2006 to "recognise the inspirational stars of tomorrow across diverse sectors". The award winners will be announced on 15 November at a ceremony at the London Hilton hotel. Harshitha, who recently began as Product Strategy Manager at travel company Expedia in London, was co-chair of the Student SIG (student interest group) part of Cambridge Judge Business School's Wo+Men's Leadership Centre, which addresses gender diversity in senior business leadership positions. The Centre held its third annual conference in June 2017 with the theme "Finding Balance".…

Paper co-authored by Dr Helen Haugh of Cambridge Judge Business School wins Best Social Entrepreneurship Award at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management. A paper on how social entrepreneurs can best allocate resources, co-authored by Helen Haugh, Senior Lecturer in Community Enterprise at Cambridge Judge Business School, won the Best Social Entrepreneurship Award at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management. The award, granted by the Academy of Management’s Entrepreneurship Division, was announced at the Academy’s August meeting in Atlanta. The winning paper – entitled "Social entrepreneur strategising: making sense of conflicting demands" – was co-authored by Dr Helen Haugh of Cambridge Judge Business School and Dr Kate Sugar of the University of Bath. "Using qualitative data gathered from social entrepreneurs we theorise four novel cognitive frames adopted when responding to conflicting demands," the paper says. "The four frames provide a novel contribution to the strategic cognition literature by illuminating how social entrepreneurs make sense of conflicting demands when strategising."…

Alison Brittain, an alumna of Cambridge Judge Business School (MBA 1994), was named Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year for 2017. Alison is Chief Executive Officer at Whitbread, the company that owns Costa Coffee, Brewers Fayre and Beefeater Grill restaurants, as well as and Premier Inn – employing around 50,000 people. She is one of only seven female executives in the FTSE 100. Alison started her career at Barclays Bank as a graduate trainee, later becoming head of retail banking at Lloyds Banking Group before joining Whitbread in 2016. The award judges said Alison is "a role model for women striving to reach the top of large organisations and working across a range of traditionally male-dominated sectors." The Veuve Clicquot Business Woman Award, created in 1972, aims to recognise the success of businesswomen worldwide.…

Founders of two ventures with Cambridge Judge Business School connections – LifNano Therapeutics and Footprints Cafes – honoured at the annual Business Weekly Awards. Both ventures, supported by Accelerate Cambridge, run by the Entrepreneurship Centre at Cambridge Judge Business School, and Cambridge Social Ventures, run by the CJBS Centre for Social Innovation, were honoured with top prizes on 22 March at the awards ceremony held at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Dr Su Metcalfe, founder and Chief Scientific Officer of LifNano Therapeutics was named winner of the Woman Entrepreneur of the Year, which was sponsored by Cambridge Judge as part of the School’s Wo+Men’s Leadership Initiative. LifNano Therapeutics was founded in 2013 at the University of Cambridge’s Clinical School, where Dr Metcalfe had discovered the value of a small protein called Leukaemia Inhibitory Factor (LIF) to treat multiple sclerosis (MS). She went on to invent a simple nano-engineered form of LIF (LIFNano) designed to target disease in MS patients. The venture was recently awarded £1 million funding through Innovate UK to support a move into clinical development, with the first clinical trial in humans planned in a few years. Sucheta Nadkarni, Sinyi Professor of Chinese Management at Cambridge Judge, who announced the…

Paper on codes of conduct by Cambridge Judge PhD student, Maima Aulia Syakhroza wins Best PhD Paper at the Strategic Management Society annual conference in Berlin. A research paper by Cambridge Judge Business School PhD student Maima Aulia Syakhroza was named Best PhD Paper at the Strategic Management Society annual conference in Berlin in September. The award carries a $1,500 cash award. The paper, co-authored by two members of the Cambridge Judge faculty – Dr Kamal Munir, Reader in Strategy and Policy and Dr Lionel Paolella, University Lecturer in Strategy & Organisation – looks at how members of a category united by codes of conduct respond to threats from challengers violating the code. The paper suggests that incumbents initially emphasise their authenticity by shunning adoption of the code violation, but later their reaction shifts to "competitive participation" – joining in with the code violation. The study looks at original data on Islamic banks across 23 countries over a 10-year period to test the hypothesis. Aulia is a PhD candidate in the Strategic Management pathway at Cambridge Judge, focusing on organisational theory, with an interest in such subjects as authenticity, social identity and competitive threats.…

JustMilk wins national McKinsey Venture Academy competition. Cambridge-based venture JustMilk has won the national McKinsey Venture Academy 2016, a competition for university students based in the UK and Ireland, focused on the potential social impact of the enterprise. The prize includes seed funding of £10,000 and mentorship from McKinsey to help transform the idea into a viable social enterprise. JustMilk is supported by the Accelerate Cambridge programme run by the Entrepreneurship Centre at Cambridge Judge Business School. The competition involved four stages: creating an executive summary of the venture, producing a video pitch, generating a full business plan, and presenting to a panel of judges at McKinsey’s London office. JustMilk Limited was co-founded by Theresa Maier and another PhD student Rebekah Scheuerle in late 2015, based on the technology developed in the Bioscience Engineering Group of the Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology. Currently, Theresa operates as CEO and Cassi Henderson and Graham Mills as business development. The JustMilk project, organised by JustMilk and a US non-profit, is developing an infant drug and nutrient delivery device with the potential to improve access to life-saving medications, vitamins and nutrients to breastfeeding infants globally. The company’s silicone nipple-shield device holds a pre-measured amount…

Two Accelerate Cambridge ventures, GeneAdviser and Healx, are honoured at the Business Weekly Awards dinner. Two ventures that are supported by the Accelerate Cambridge programme at Cambridge Judge were honoured with top prizes on 16 March at the annual Business Weekly Awards held at Queens' College, Cambridge. Jelena Aleksic of genetic testing company GeneAdviser was named winner of the inaugural Woman Entrepreneur of the Year Award, which was sponsored by Cambridge Judge, while rare-disease venture Healx was named Cambridge Graduate Business of the Year winner. The awards ceremony attracted about 200 people, and prizes were presented by Warren East, Chief Executive of engineering company Rolls-Royce and former CEO at Cambridge-based computer chip designer ARM. The first Woman Entrepreneur of the Year contest "was an extremely close-run affair but we decided on Jelena for a number of reasons, not least market validity and potential healthcare impact," said Professor Sucheta Nadkarni of Cambridge Judge, who announced the new award that forms part of the Women’s Leadership Initiative launched last year at the School. "Jelena founded and has grown GeneAdviser as an online marketplace for clinical genetic testing –making it easier for doctors to find and order lifesaving tests from accredited laboratories," said…

The Cambridge-based web production company of CBR policy associate Boni Sones OBE has been internationally recognised for a two-part radio documentary it produced about women in parliament. The ParliamentaryRadio.com documentary on the 10 Labour women who stepped down from Parliament in May 2015 after clocking up 200 years of service as MPs in their constituencies can be listened to at bonisonesproductions.com/wpradio. Throwing in the Towel – How Labour Women MPs Fought to Change Westminster Politics was produced and reported on by Boni Sones OBE, and a team of three other journalists from the Eastern Region: Jackie Ashley of The Guardian and now President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge; Deborah McGurran, BBC Political Editor, East of England, and Linda Fairbrother, formerly of Anglia TV, who also lives in Cambridge and was the High Sheriff of Cambridgeshire. They were assisted by Dr Paul Seaward, Director of the History of Parliament Trust, who lives in Cambridge and who has now deposited all of the interviews in his Archives for safekeeping for historians of the future. The list of those interviewed for the documentary includes two former Secretaries of State, Tessa Jowell and Hazel Blears, and five former ministers or junior ministers; Anne McGuire,…

Jo Mills of Cambridge Judge named one of top 100 entrepreneurship teachers by tech publication Hot Topics. Jo Mills, Programme Director of the Postgraduate Diploma in Entrepreneurship at Cambridge Judge, has been named one of the top 100 people teaching entrepreneurship by the online publication Hot Topics, which focuses on the technology community. Criteria for the list includes working for a top-tier university or business school, helping to shape the direction of entrepreneurship, or publication of journal articles concerning entrepreneurship. Those named to the top 100 list were nominated by tech entrepreneurs, investors and executives. "Those featured have unquestionably contributed to the entrepreneurial revolution, teaching entrepreneurship formally to those changing the world," the publication said.…

Awards for PhD student Laura Claus for studies on 'hybridity'. Laura Claus, a PhD candidate at Cambridge Judge Business School, recently was honoured with two awards relating to her research conducted along with her PhD advisor, Shaz Ansari, on the subject of "hybridity." Laura was awarded a prestigious Ewing Marion Kauffmann Award at a Social Entrepreneurship Conference in Denver, Colorado, in April, for a paper on "social hybridity." The paper examines institutional complexity in "hybrid" organisations that have competing demands (for example, between promoting social welfare and maximising financial profit) – showing how organisations can maintain their hybridity over time without drifting toward either alternative. In addition, Laura received an Organisation and Management Theory stipend to attend the Alberta Institutions Conference held in Banff, Canada, in June 2015, for her paper: "Keeping it weird: coping with institutional complexity as an ongoing accomplishment over time" – which was her MPhil dissertation at Cambridge University. This paper also looks at corporate hybridity, finding that individuals caught between conflicting institutional prescriptions coped by means of "anchoring" – mitigating the discomfort experienced from having to satisfy competing demands. "Both these papers make important findings related to hybridity, a field of studies that is becoming…