Andres Urena

Why I chose Loughborough University London 

My path to Loughborough was far from linear and I think that’s the most honest way to put it. Out of three institutions to choose from, I chose Loughborough not because it was the most prestigious at the time, but because it felt right. Loughborough's programme felt genuinely experimental. My profile has always been what you might call M-shaped: broad across disciplines, deeply unconventional in how I connect them. Loughborough felt like the programme that was actually designed for someone like me, rather than one that would try to fit me into a standard mould. Since I studied here in 2019/20, Loughborough has risen to 6th in the Complete University Guide 2025 and consistently ranks in the UK top ten across every major league table — a trajectory I sensed but couldn't have fully proven at the time.

My overall academic experience

Disruptive in the best sense and I mean that literally, not as a buzzword. I arrived at Loughborough London in 2019 with nearly fifteen years of professional experience across advertising, digital strategy, architecture, and early-stage ventures. I wasn't coming to fill gaps in a CV. I came because I wanted my thinking challenged, and the MSc in Managing Innovation in Creative Organisations delivered exactly that.  

What struck me most was that the programme didn't try to smooth out the unconventional edges of my profile — it rewarded them. But what made the academic experience exceptional wasn't just the curriculum — it was the environment that Ben Cole (Head of Future Space), Hayley Jones (former Student Enterprise Coordinator), and Ashley Gray (former Innovation Programme Manager) had built around it. The three of them put an extraordinary amount of personal effort into making Loughborough London feel like a genuine, vibrant community rather than a collection of students attending lectures. That distinction matters enormously, especially for postgraduate students who've already been out in the world and know the difference.  

The Collaborative Project module — where you work directly with a real company on a real problem, was also a highlight. You're accountable to an actual client, which changes everything about how you approach your work.

Aspects of my course I found particularly useful 

Two things stand out.  

First: the structured discipline of thinking about innovation not as a flash of inspiration but as a system. I had spent years building things — a social media department at a WPP agency, startup communities in Lima, experimental digital products — but often on instinct. The course forced me to stress-test that instinct with theory, which made me a much sharper operator. Today, running a programme for 185+ ventures at LUinc., I can recognise patterns in early-stage businesses much faster because I had to study those patterns academically first.  

Second:  The Dean's Award for Enterprise pitch process. Having to develop a pitch for Food. Food  — a tech platform solving the data problem for restaurant menus and food delivery apps — taught me to compress complex systemic thinking into a clear, compelling story. The panel asked hard questions. Ben Cole pushed me. I had to think on my feet and defend every assumption. That experience is something I now recognise as core to what I do: making complicated things simple enough to act on. Interestingly, the idea turned out to be more prescient than I anticipated — when the pandemic triggered an explosion of dark kitchens in 2020, I couldn't help but smile at the irony.

Highlight of my time at Loughborough University London outside of my course 

A highlight I didn't anticipate, and the one that has compounded most over time, was the people I met.  During the programme I became close friends with an engineer from Argentina who was studying at the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Innovation (now Institute of International Management and Entrepreneurship) at Loughborough. We were very different profiles: he came from seven years in finance at Procter & Gamble; I came from advertising and startups in Lima. We became, and remain, close friends. The friendships you make there aren't the kind that fade after graduation. They're the kind that come with a front-row seat to each other's journeys.  

Beyond that, the campus environment on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is something else. You're surrounded by some of the most interesting infrastructure in London, in a building designed for people who are building things. The sense that the place itself has momentum, that it's going somewhere, is infectious.  

The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park campus was the full extent of my Loughborough experience as a student, and it was genuinely excellent. Architecturally purposeful, professionally connected, and positioned in the middle of what were genuinely the early years of east London's innovation district. Being on campus during what were really its formative years as a tech and innovation hub was something I didn't fully appreciate at the time. Through connections made via the university, I had the opportunity to collaborate briefly with the Head of Creative at BT Sport and with the Plexal Innovation Team — both based on the same campus ecosystem. These weren't placements or formal programmes; they were the kind of real conversations and collaborations that happen when a university is embedded in an innovation district rather than cordoned off from it.  

How Loughborough University London prepared me for my current career path 

I think I'm one of the most complete examples of the Loughborough Enterprise Network (LEN) pipeline working as intended, though I say that with full awareness that I didn't plan it that way. It unfolded through a series of decisions that each followed curiosity rather than a predetermined strategy.  

I arrived as an international student from Peru. I got connected to Future Space through the enterprise team. I won the Dean's Award and then the London Student Entrepreneur of the Year at the Virtual Enterprise Awards in June 2020. I graduated, flew back to Lima mid-pandemic, and launched Oscar Internet: a mesh router company built around the idea that every room in a home should have one reliable Wi-Fi signal. It did close to $100K in its first year, operating entirely remotely, during a global lockdown, with supply chains that made every shipment feel like a small miracle. It wasn't the easiest conditions to prove a concept. But it worked — well enough that it opened the door to a Startup Visa Endorsement through the University.  

Today I work as Startup Programme Lead at LUinc., three years in, supporting a portfolio of 185 active ventures that have collectively raised £14.3M in external investment and created over 700 jobs across the East Midlands, collaborating with Charnwood Borough Council, UK Prosperity Fund, and of course Loughborough University. The role is a strange and wonderful one to try to describe. I'm not quite staff in the conventional sense, and I'm not quite a Founder anymore either. The closest I've come to naming it is this: I crossed the threshold. I went from being someone who benefited from the ecosystem to someone who builds it — and because I've been on both sides, I understand what matters to an early-stage Founder in a way that's hard to fake. The incubator gets a Programme Lead who has shipped products, run teams, navigated visa bureaucracy, and moved countries on a bet. The Founders get someone who has been exactly where they are. 

What Loughborough gave me wasn't just skills or contacts. It gave me a context in which my combination of experience, had somewhere to go. The programme sharpened how I think.