Ronjon Nag Commercialisation Prize - Student Pitch Competition

Over the past few weeks University of Birmingham students have been submitting their entrepreneurial ideas for a chance to win a £5,000 prize. The Ronjon Nag Commercialisation Prize will be awarded to the student tech project or business idea with the strongest commercial potential.

This year we want your help! We are inviting our alumni to join the pitch event live on Zoom, where students will have the opportunity to present their ideas to Ronjon and a panel of alumni entrepreneurs. Following the presentations we will invite all alumni to provide feedback, ask questions and vote for your favourite.

The virtual doors will open at 7.30pm British Summer Time (11.30am Pacific Standard Time) for networking, with the pitches taking place from 8.00pm - 9.30pm BST (12.00pm - 1.30pm PST). A Zoom link will be sent to you prior to the event.

We hope you can join us for this exciting event. The competition was a huge success last year and we hope you can join us this year to hear directly from budding student entrepreneurs at Birmingham and show them your support. 

With thanks to Ronjon Nag (BSc Electrical Engineering, 1984) for hosting.

Alumni judging panel

Janice Roberts 

Janice is an experienced global technology executive and venture capitalist based in Silicon Valley, where her board experience spans public, private, and nonprofit organizations.
She currently serves on the boards of Zynga Inc, Zebra Technologies, Inc. and Netgear Inc.

Janice has been a Partner at BGV (Benhamou Global Ventures) from 2014, where she invests in early stage and “cross-border” companies, with a focus on the digital transformation of enterprises globally. From 2000 to 2013, Ms. Roberts served as Managing Director of Mayfield Fund, investing in wireless, mobile, enterprise and consumer technology companies. From 1992 to 2000, Ms. Roberts was employed by 3Com Corporation (which was later acquired by Hewlett Packard), where she held various executive positions, including Senior Vice President of Global Marketing and Business Development, President of 3Com Ventures, and President of the Palm Computing Business Unit.

Ms. Roberts is a Director (and previously Co-Chair) of GBx Global.org, a curated network of British entrepreneurs and senior technology executives in Silicon Valley; supporting cross-border initiatives and emerging companies. She also serves on the advisory board of Illuminate Ventures. Janice holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree (honours) from the University of Birmingham in the U.K.

Dr Ronjon Nag

Ronjon is an expert in artificial intelligence systems and built his first speech recognition system at the University of Birmingham’s Electrical Engineering Department, receiving a 1st class BSc; worked on neural networks at Cambridge, where he received a PhD in engineering; continued at Stanford Psychology Department, where he is currently an Interdisciplinary Distinguished Careers Institute Fellow; and at MIT, where he received an MS. He received the IET Mountbatten Medal at the Royal Institution for work in the mobile industry.   Companies he has co-founded or advised have been sold to Motorola, BlackBerry, and Apple. He is on the board of, and assists deep science startups in the US and UK. He is currently President of the R42 Institute.

Dom McCarthy

Following his graduation from Birmingham Dom worked for Hewlett Packard in the UK designing disk and tape drives, before moving into HP Laboratories, where he led research into high-performance embedded systems. In 1999 he joined a start-up in Silicon Valley developing microprocessors for networking products.  Dom has held interim CEO positions and board seats on various portfolio companies. Notably, he was part of the team that invested in Tesla Motors. Since 2012, he has worked at Apple, where he runs the Systems Engineering teams for all Mac and iPad products.