Nicola Kennedy: An energy intrapreneur

So I’m Nicola Kennedy. I am a current student on the Master of Studies in Entrepreneurship at the University of Cambridge. I joined the programme a year ago with the intention of helping me set up ventures within a big multinational energy company. So when I joined the programme, I was an intrapreneur. I was building companies from within a big multinational corporate.

So I was the head of Ideas Lab at Centurion Innovations. And my job was to find ideas from within the business, and to incubate those businesses– build them out– and then to look at how we can build the future of the company. And one of the things that the course gave me was access to a really brilliant network. And it gave me the confidence to think about how I could do this by myself.

On my very first day at Cambridge, I walked into a lecture theatre. And I met somebody who ended up becoming my co-founder of the three new ventures that I am setting up at the moment. And we spent about 12 months talking through lots of different ideas– testing lots of different things out– really exploring whether or not we thought we could work together.

One of the things that really benefited us was being on the course. And being able to go through the theory together. So it wasn’t one of us that was learning, and the other one was still trying to understand what they were talking about. We knew the right questions to ask, and we were able to really use that experience and expertise to balance each other out. And to really test each other.

I’m based in London, and my business partner is based in America. And that understanding and access to two very different markets has created a really interesting opportunity where we can spot things that are happening that aren’t happening in the other market.

So we now have three very early stage ventures that we are testing out. The first of those ventures is called Notoma. And it is a nontoxic marketplace that sells products for families. And this was a challenge that we found that we had when we had very small children at home. We would go and look for products, and we were finding that so many products that we bring into our homes aren’t regulated.

And the second business that we’ve been testing out– again, it’s a very early stage business– is called Juventology Labs. One of the first products that we have developed within Juventology Labs is a beauty drink. It has 15 different multivitamins in it, and it is designed to provide beauty from within. So it looks at all of your skin, hair, and nails.

The third business has actually sprung up over the last three months. So ever since we’ve had the pandemic, we noticed a huge shift to online learning. So our third venture is something that has happened very, very quickly. It’s actually going to be the first to launch. And we’re running online five-day boot camps that teach you survival skills.

One of the huge challenges that, I think, we have as entrepreneurs is whether or not to look at venture funding, or to fund businesses ourselves. It’s been one of the things, actually, that through the course– really starting to unpick that relationship between an investor and an entrepreneur– has enabled me to make some really clear choices in terms of what I want to be doing.

So coming from a background of clean tech, the biggest challenge that we had was there were very few female entrepreneurs coming through in clean tech. So in clean tech, that’s a really strong thing– is that it’s much harder for female entrepreneurs to go out there and to get investment.

One of the things I love about being an entrepreneur and having my own business is that I have the ability to fit it around my life and my responsibilities as a mother. And that’s one of the really big challenges of having a corporate career. And what I found with entrepreneurship is, actually, it gives you so much more freedom to be able to live the life that you actually want to lead.

My take on entrepreneurship and the people that make the biggest strides in disrupting industries or building new, interesting businesses is they’re the people that don’t come from the sector. Because they’re the people that are not bound by the rules or the regulations, or the old ways of doing things.

And so it’s been a really interesting challenge to actually say I know clean tech– I know clean tech inside out. But what I want to do is– I want to take my understanding of things like regulation, and take that to a completely new sector, which is really exciting.