Celebrating the Third Year of the E-Lab Essay Competition in 2025
Written by Rhys Williams
Now in its third year, the King’s E-Lab Entrepreneurship Essay Competition has reached students from over 500 schools across the UK, with more than 340 essays submitted in 2025 alone. The competition is designed to encourage 16–18-year-olds to get excited about entrepreneurship and to show that an academic mindset and an entrepreneurial spirit are not opposing forces, but complementary ones. Regardless of whether they hope to pursue higher education, apprenticeships, or their own entrepreneurial ventures, this competition urges them to consider the relevance of innovative thinking to all career avenues.
For the 2025 competition, we focused on three contemporary challenges in the world of entrepreneurship and innovation. First, on how entrepreneurs can locate good ideas (29% of essays tackled this). Second, on the challenges faced by entrepreneurs and how they can overcome them (55%). And, third, on team building (29%). We had over 340 fantastic essays from students all over the country, from 247 different schools. This brings the total number of different schools we have reached across the three years of the competition to a round 500!
The questions were designed to get participants to think about entrepreneurship in the real world rather than to simply produce an academic-style essay. In particular, we were keen to hear stories of small-scale, local, and family founders and entrepreneurs – remember, whilst unicorn-style successes like Elon Musk and Bill Gates occur, entrepreneurship is all around us, from the owner of the local convenience shop to family friends running their own small-scale business, to entrepreneurial students selling sweets in the school playground! Additionally, we didn’t just want to hear a history of an entrepreneur’s successes or challenges; we wanted the key lessons and insights to be drawn out and analysed.
Successful essays followed the advice given on the Essay Page and the previous blogpost! In particular, they were easy-to-read, supported by interesting case studies, and grounded by a consideration of the entrepreneurial aspects of each case, rather than by the reiteration of any one theoretical economic or philosophical perspective. Some essays were on the short-side: 1,000 words is already a rather small limit, if you’re writing less than 800 words then you probably aren’t considering all angles of the question!
For the question on finding good ideas, convincing essays discussed that ideas needed to address a consumer problem and be useful (rather than just clever) in order to find a sizeable market to sell to; how to find ideas through consumer surveys and evaluating the product landscape, and serendipity. Interesting case studies were provided by Smol (UK detergent company), candidates on Dragon’s Den, Juicero (an example of what not to do!), and interviews from local entrepreneurs.
On the challenges faced by entrepreneurs, good essays analysed the reason challenges were faced and, importantly, how they were overcome. For instance, the story of Solar Buddies – a company making suncream, run by two working mothers – illustrated challenges such as lacking insider connections and (potential) investors and how they were able to enter business competitions and secure grants from local organisations. Other challenges that essays discussed include finding product market fit, building the necessary team for success, dealing with mental and emotional fatigue, dealing with rules and regulation, and setting a business culture to empower employees.
In terms of building a team for success, most essays mentioned that a single entrepreneur alone cannot found a successful business. They need others around them to complement their skills and complete the tasks that an individual cannot do by themselves (think of the idea of comparative advantage). Some essays talked about how to find the right team and ensure that all members of the business were aligned on the same goals and had the necessary backing to thrive in their job.
As ever, the quality, as well as the number of submissions, was high. It was, therefore, a tall order to narrow the entries down to a shortlist of 50 and, ultimately, to select the 3 winners who celebrated their hard work at the prizegiving ceremony at King’s in December.
We offer a huge congratulations to Georgio Alambritis (Tuxford Academy), the winner of this year’s competition, and to Jessica Smart (Harlington Upper School) and Rahul Thotakura (King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford), the two runners-up, for their fantastic achievements!
This year we also introduced commendations, for excellent essays that were shortlisted by our judges. The following 17 students (listed alphabetically) received a commendation, alongside a £20 Waterstones gift card, congratulations to them:
Krish Bhatnagar (Southend High School for Boys)
Maliha Butt (Dormers Wells High School)
Ronald Chan (Lancaster Royal Grammar School)
Erin Cheong (Tonbridge Grammar School)
Evie Dewhurst (Southend High School for Boys)
Chadi Falla (Tiffin School for Boys)
Elliot Gent (Brighton College)
Alina Hendrickson (South Hampstead High School)
Liam Jenkins (Runshaw College)
Blake Lyons (The Elmgreen School)
Lindi Nyoni (St Ninian’s High School)
Maximilien Perdon (St Paul’s School)
Alex Raichura (Colyton Grammar School)
Joshua Saunders (Ballakermeen High School)
Ben Sawtell (The Leys School)
Veer Seth (King Edward VI Grammar School)
Fifi Siddiqui (St Olave’s Grammar School)
The prizegiving ceremony was a brilliant opportunity to celebrate entrepreneurship at King’s. The event kicked off with a tour of the College (including the Chapel and Keynes’ set) and the archives. We then enjoyed a lunch in the Provost’s Lodge with the winners, their families, and the E-Lab Team. Many stories were shared; inspiration a plenty for the next generation of budding entrepreneurs! We then moved to the awards ceremony, in the beautiful surroundings of the Provost’s Drawing Room, where the winners were presented with their awards.
We would like to thank all those who have contributed to making this second edition of the essay competition a success: Kamiar Mohaddes, Sophie Harbour, Mia Fulford, Tom Davies, the teachers and last, but certainly not least, all the brilliant students themselves!
Throughout the first quarter of the new year, we will post the 3 winning essays on our Mindsets blog to share the insights of this year’s winners. In the run-up to the April launch of the 2026 competition, we also hope that the essays serve as examples to interested students of what we look for in a submission. You can see the winning entries from the 2024 competition here.
We hope that sharing the winning essays over the coming months will inspire students considering the 2026 competition. Whether you are curious about entrepreneurship or are simply keen to explore how ideas turn into impact, we encourage you to take part when the competition launches in April.
Rhys Williams is a Senior Associate at the E-Lab and a 3rd year PhD student in Economics at the Judge Business School. His research interests are in how to design better competition policy to maximise consumer welfare. This ranges from his work on low price guarantees, to research on resale price maintenance, and how consumers respond to quality ratings in healthcare settings. In the past he has looked at the effect of Fixed Book Price policies across Europe, and how staff casualisation in higher education affects student satisfaction.