Michael Fowle

I have been an AL on ’B327 Creating Futures: Sustainable Enterprise and Innovation’. I am also currently programme leader for ‘Innovation and Intrapreneurship: Winning Strategies for New Venture Creation’ at Cambridge University, and the founder of New Venture Education Ltd where we design and deliver programmes to promote entrepreneurship.

My background is in technology entrepreneurship. For the last 25 years I have been teaching entrepreneurship and founding, funding, rescuing and mentoring small to medium companies. I successfully raised over £100m for my projects, won the DTI e-business startup of the year and won MIT’s Entrepreneurship Development Programme. Before that I was a director at the UK’s largest teaching hospital and ran my own computer company.

I have always been very intrigued by the OU, its philosophy and the quality of its programmes. OU students are often living “real lives” while they study - and that’s an important business and life skill. I had never delivered an online course before, so when the opportunity arose, how could I resist?

One of my projects was making (very) high-pitched squeaky noises that scare bacteria so they get distracted and can’t form biofilms so quickly. It was a scientific triumph and a business disaster.