In the middle of January, the E-Lab hosted its 2026 Social Venture Residential Programme in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Programme and the Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation. Designed to support students of all disciplines in developing sustainable and ethical projects with a positive social and environmental impact, the SVR aims to equip those with a passion for change with key entrepreneurial skills. In this week’s blog, read Mphil student Damilola Oyeyemi’s reflections on the residential and on the mindset shifts it created for her.

After winning the Simmons & Simmons challenge at the E-Lab LLMxLaw Hackathon 2.0, the Jurispark team visited the firm's London office in December 2025 to demo their AI-powered legal research platform. In this week’s blog read about what they learned about bridging academic innovation and legal practice and about the value of practical insights.

On December 6th, we celebrated the third year of our Entrepreneurship Essay Competition and announced the 2025 Winners at an Awards Ceremony in King’s College. The essay competition serves to foster entrepreneurial mindsets in young students and to encourage them to engage with innovative thinking, this year welcoming over 340 entries from across 247 schools. In this week’s blog, our Senior Associate Rhys Williams explains the value of the competition, the themes of this year’s essay questions, and the strategies employed by our three winners and 17 commended essays.

In 2025, we hosted 96 incredible events, including fireside chats, panels, workshops, expos, and other impactful gatherings. We welcomed pioneering thinkers and leaders from will.i.am to Nobel Prize Laureate Geoff Hinton.

Alongside artists, scientists, Governors, MPs, Nobel Prize winners, ambassadors, policymakers and business leaders we provided the space for nearly 7,000 students, university members and guests to engage with innovators of all kinds.

Read more about a year of new endeavors at the E-Lab, including our highlights, activities, celebrations and much more in this piece.

On the 29 November 2025, Lord Mervyn King delivered the annual Provost’s Lecture at King’s College, Cambridge during the 1441 Foundation Dinner. To celebrate the 100th piece for our blog series, we’re delighted to share Lord King’s words from the evening on the theme of uncertainty and serendipity in contemporary times.

Despite evidence to the contrary, it can still be easy to assume that people who are loving their work, and thriving in a particular career path, always planned it that way. In reality, linear routes rarely exist and learning how to pivot is an important skill. In this week’s blog, read Anna Winter’s reflection on how her pivoting prompted her to pursue her passion for climate tech, leading her to found her very own startup, Auralytica, and to dedicate her energy to tackling food waste across industries.

From June 19th to June 22nd 2025, the King’s E-Lab hosted its second annual Hackathon with Hack the Law in partnership with Stanford’s CODEX. The weekend brought together over 150 students from 14 countries representing 43 universities and produced exciting collaborations and innovative solutions to legal challenges set out by our sponsors. In this week’s blog, hear from VibeLegal on their experience as a fully ‘non-tech’ team in a hackathon competition.

On the 30^th of October 2025, the E-Lab hosted HealthTech founder, CEO Coach, and Chairman Kevin McDonnell for a discussion on key lessons for HealthTech startups. HealthTech sounds like the perfect career path for the ambitious entrepreneur – a chance to improve lives and build a successful business. But most founders quickly learn: selling into the NHS is nothing like traditional startups. In this week’s blog, read Coco Newtons’s reflections from her conversation with Kevin about uncomfortable truths in NHS entrepreneurship, how founders should re-design their strategies to adapt to these realities, and what we can hope for when we learn to build trust.

Each September, the E-Lab hosts a residential week as a part of its core residential programme. This year, we welcomed 62 students from across 12 Cambridge Colleges keen to learn how to take their innovative ideas forward. Through workshops, lectures and socials students learnt everything from the basics of finance, marketing and IP to how to creatively communicate their proposals and build meaningful stakeholder maps. In this week’s blog, read PhD student Maryam Bham’s reflections on the women who inspire her understanding of entrepreneurship and on how the week left her with a sharpened mindset and a renewed sense of purpose to build something meaningful.

Today, water insecurity in Harare reflects a broader crisis across sub-Saharan Africa. Over 400 million people in the region still lack access to basic drinking water; centralised systems are struggling to plug gaps; and in informal and peri-urban areas infrastructure investment often lags behind the need. In this context, Allen Chafa envisioned Aqua Solutions as a decentralised solution to build equitable and resilient infrastructure and to tackle diverse water challenges. In this week’s blog, read Allen’s reflections on what sparked his passion for engineering and social innovation, how the E-Lab’s programming has helped support his venture creation and how, when it comes down to it, real problems do not wait for perfect solutions.

When Alan Turing proposed the imitation game in 1950 the question, ‘can machines think?’ provocatively probed the boundaries of artificial intelligence. To mark the 75th anniversary of Turing’s Turing Test, the E-Lab and the Centre for the Future of Intelligence hosted a two-day conference at King’s College, Cambridge to ask a deceptively simple question: what should we test now? In this week’s blog, read Part Two of our write up from the conference from PhD students Bernardo Villegas Moreno, Drew Calcagno and Noah Broestl.

In 1950, Sir Alan Turing’s seminal paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” probed the question ‘Can machines think?’ and introduced the concept of what is now known as the Turing test to the world. Today, the question of what computers can do – now, next year, or in 5 years or 20 – has become an urgent one. To mark the 75th anniversary of Turing’s remarkable publication, to honour his foundational part in the establishment of the field of artificial intelligence, and to press the questions of AI’s problems and possibilities, the King’s E-Lab and the Centre for the Future of Intelligence hosted a two-day conference at King’s College, Cambridge. In this week’s blog, read Part One of our write up from the conference from PhD student and E-Lab member Jacob Forward as he reflects on Day One.

Europe’s early-stage funding landscape is evolving fast. As investors shift toward growth-stage resilience, the definition of “early” has shifted—pushing founders to prove more, sooner. Elevated interest rates, AI-driven disruption, and tighter capital pools have elevated what qualifies as a viable pre-seed or seed round, meaning that, for founders, it is efficiency and proof - not just promise - that now open funding doors. In this week’s blog, EMBA student Philip Clements reflects on these changes through his time at Dublin’s leading SaaStock conference, the crossroads of SaaS and AI innovation.

Last week we hosted the Next Turing Tests Conference to celebrate the anniversary of Turing’s paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ and to explore a variety of questions about AI.

Continuing this theme, in this week’s blog one of our E-Lab residential students, Hanu Priya Indiran, outlines how she is using AI in her research to design manufacturing systems for sustainability, at scale.