A team of students from the University of Bristol’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship has won a prestigious design award for a challenge to increase the take-up of shared parental leave.
The three students worked on a brief set by the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) to complete their entry for its Student Design Award. 
They were tasked with designing a system, service or campaign to encourage or enable parents, employers or society more widely to embrace shared parental leave (SPL).
The team was made up of Frank Mavin, who is studying management with innovation, Riley Nicholas (history with innovation) and Hamza Qureshi (film and television with innovation).
Their starting point was the fact that currently fewer than 2% of eligible parents take SPL.
Frank said: “We took a human-centred design approach to solve the challenge – that is, we worked to understand the people involved in or impacted by the challenge before developing a solution.
“This included conducting research with parents eligible for SPL and a variety of employers. We also used data and information provided by the RSA and sources.”
Through their research, they found that parents in small firms felt uncomfortable taking leave knowing they would be ‘letting down’ their colleagues and employers in their absence.
The team wanted to change this with their initiative ‘MentorMe’, which links employers of parents looking to take leave with graduates in need of work experience.
The graduates are trained during a period of mentorship by the parent to temporarily replace them while leave is taken – meaning the service supports the uptake of SPL while offering graduates the opportunity to gain valuable work experience.
Riley added: “We were really out of our comfort zones with this kind of project. Most of the other submissions were very design heavy so we felt a little outmatched; it was great to hear that we could compete with artists and designers and give the judges something special.
“I’m interested in novel concepts and human focused design – so we were pretty hooked by our idea from the beginning. It’s the kind of idea you can explain in two sentences and it works.”
Hamza said that tackling the issues associated with SPL was something none of them were familiar with.
“Creating a suitable solution for it is something we as a team are very proud of. Excited to be taking this project forward,” he said.
The Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship offers a four-year integrated master’s degree programme, a first-of-its-kind degree, that brings students together from 11 different disciplines (including computer science, anthropology, history and theatre) to study innovation and entrepreneurship alongside their subject specialism.
Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship academic director Dr Kirsten Cater said: “We are so proud of our students having achieved this RSA award in recognition of their fantastic idea.
“This award highlights the impact of the centre’s transdisciplinary teamwork approach in order to come up with innovative ideas to tackle pressing social, economic and environmental issues.”
The centre aims to produce the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs with the adaptability, agility, transdisciplinary and innovative thinking to make positive differences in an ever-changing world.
Teaching has an emphasis on challenge-based, collaborative learning which allows students to draw upon their subject specialism while collaborating in multidisciplinary teams to deliver new and innovative solutions to a given real-world challenge.
Through these challenges, students and staff work in collaboration with a wide range of industry partners, social ventures and start-ups, providing the opportunity for students to develop practical skills and gain real-world experience working on live projects.
In addition to the four-year programme, the centre also offers a one-year MSc in Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
