"The motto of my Service Innovation module is “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”. It is fascinating to observe how this quote often attributed to a management guru Ted Levitt can transform mindsets, change attitudes and elevate confidence  of business students when exploring, conceptualising and prototyping service innovation. My collaboration with Eligent Club and their startups provides an exciting opportunity for the students to apply this transformative thinking in the context of real business challenges. I am very grateful to all entrepreneurs involved, and  can’t wait to watch pitches of my students”.

“Such collaboration is one of the great examples of how academic programmes can be bridged with the real startup world through engaging with our Eligent Club community. Within business challenge projects, early-stage companies can get various solutions from students that they can apply immediately. Equally, students can see how academic knowledge they get during their study can have a practical and impactful outcome for businesses. I am extremely fascinated by such a collaboration initiative, and many thanks to Dr Vadim Grinevich for such a joint project.”

"We are very grateful for the opportunity to participate in this amazing initiative organised by dr Vadim Grinevich Director of Centre for Inclusive and Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Innovation, to design a portfolio of Service Innovation Challenges for students as part of their group projects for MSc Module on Service Innovation at the University of Southampton Business School with Eligent Club and Slava Baranovskiy collaboration. For us it’s been a great experience”.

“This is a fantastic opportunity to involve diverse groups of people to workshop crucial challenges founders are often faced with. Students' creativity and professionalism was evident all throughout the Q&A session. I am looking forward to all of the exciting pitches. Thanks to Dr Vadim Grinevich, collaborative and enterprising ideas are not just “interesting”, they are practical and can be applied to my long term business strategy. My gratitude extends to the University of Southampton Business School and Eligent Club for making such an innovative approach to service design and entrepreneurship come to life for us!”

"This is such a unique opportunity for everyone involved from the collaboration of Founders and future leaders from the Entrepreneurship and Innovation course at Southampton University with Eligent Club and Entrepreneurship Professors, it gives a rare chance to the companies to explore from similar mindsets and with future generations to apply their theory and perspective and bring innovative solutions to the problems companies are solving and dealing with daily. It has been exciting to work with Slava Baranovsky, (Founder) from Eligent Club and Dr Vadim Grinevich (Director of the Centre for Inclusive and Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Innovation) from the University of Southampton, both have a strong presence of nurturing leaders which is beautiful to see and work with.  They have truly given a great opportunity to the students to bring excellent practical problems to light, which are faced in small to large companies globally. This kind of collaboration is priceless. Thank you to Eligent Club, Slava and Southampton University, Vadim for the great opportunity to create these workshops with the students, it has been great fun sharing, listening and supporting each student. For the students it has been great opportunity to get a real case study on a company and have the chance to make an impact, by solving problems and supporting the growth and performance of a company as great leaders do.”