Participants of the 2025 Summer School alongside UCL School of Management’s Susan Smith and Edyta Kostanek, as well as panellists Jane Hollinshead, Deen Kobir, Usha Kong and Kamya Marwah.
On 28 July, UCL School of Management welcomed Year 12 students based in east London to Level 50 of One Canada Square for the second iteration of our annual Summer School initiative. Over the course of the week, participants were challenged to develop innovative and creative solutions for tackling excessive waste in London.
The programme began with an introduction to the fundamentals of sustainability and its growing importance for businesses today. Economic longevity, regulatory pressures, and shifting consumer expectations are driving these changes. Professor Susan Smith led a session on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to deepen students’ understanding.
Maya Cara, Associate Professor and Programme Director for the BSc Information Management for Business, introduced the five stages of human-centred problem-solving—empathise, design, ideate, prototype, and test—placing particular emphasis on the empathise stage.
Associate Professor Neil Sutherland guided students through the define stage, helping them analyse user needs and frame problems to uncover effective solutions. UCL School of Management’s Entrepreneurship Lead, Pierre-Jean Hanard, delivered a session on case study analysis and ideation tools.
We were delighted to welcome UCL School of Management alumni Bakhtaver Mohammed and Divine Kudzewlor, who shared insights into their education and career journey as a young professionals.
During the Summer School, students also visited The Felix Project in Canary Wharf, a non-profit organisation combatting food waste and hunger by rescuing good, surplus food that cannot be sold and redistributing it to food banks, primary schools and charities in London.
The week concluded with final presentations, where students pitched their waste-management solutions to a panel of experts: Jane Hollinshead (Chief People Officer, Canary Wharf Group), Usha Kong (Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Novi Futures), Deen Kobir (Strategy Consultant, Amazon), and Kamya Marwah (Content and Community Lead, Stealth Startup).
We were delighted to deliver this Summer School initiative in collaboration with Canary Wharf Group (CWG), who invited 4 students from the programme to take part in a work experience programme within the organisation, gaining key insights into CWG’s overall strategy and its work in the sustainability space.
