Transcript for Nigel Chute business breakfast transcript

I’m Nigel Chute. I’m a product designer and founder of Chute Design. I help entrepreneurial-minded people take an idea from concept all the way to market and get them ready for scale. I’ve been a friend of the University for quite a few years. I was involved with the Grand Idea Innovation Awards run by Katy Duke at the University and I was a mentor for some years for some of the students and I would accompany them on their year-long journey through the process. And so when Farm491 came along, it was a very natural progression really because it brought together my two interests of the worlds of business and education. I would say it’s been absolutely invaluable and a real pleasure meeting like minds over breakfast. Couple of examples come to mind straight away. I met Carol Taylor here and Carol is a director of Little Sparks Strategy. They’re marketing consultants and Carol has a background in product marketing and product management, so a really good strategic fit for me. And the second one I’d say would be Rui Manaia. Now Rui is a student here at the RAU doing a masters in Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security and is doing some great work with me researching and developing a new agritech product for farmers helping in the recycling of plastic. It’s been a real pleasure working with Rui, somebody younger than me with a real passion for the rural world and who’s also got a really good business head. So it’s been a great pleasure working with him and again all through Farm491. I would recommend the series to any local business person who has an interest in agritech, innovation in farming and all the associated activities and businesses concerned with that with which we’re well supplied in in Gloucestershire. The second group of people I would think of would really be the student body, the RAU. It’s an absolute no-brainer for them. I would say it would give them confidence and also get them into the habit of networking, a lifelong skill. And and I always feel that the earliest the early students can get into that the better.