RAJA and the GBN Venture Day 2024

This week, RAJA took part in Cranfield Universities Venture Day!

As part of our ongoing push for great CSR, RAJA UK is now part of the Green Business Network which brings together like-minded businesses with an ongoing commitment to foster a sustainable future through collaborative business practices. The Green Business Network (GBN) helps businesses to reduce their impact on the environment and communicate with each other providing opportunities for greater synergy.

The Green Business Network was taken over by Cranfield University in 2024 and one of the annual events is the Venture Day.  Venture Day is Cranfield University’s annual entrepreneurship conference connecting entrepreneurs, SME owners, investors, and academia for a day of learning and networking. This year it was attended by our very own Philip Price, the Product Data Manager here at RAJA, as well as contender for the Environmental Champion Award at the Environmental Packaging Awards!

This unique conference brings together key stakeholders in the entrepreneurial ecosystem to discuss varied topics from sustainable marketing strategies to financing the future. The day was a mixture of specialist panel discussions, workshops and industry leading presentations. These are done as both large collective activities or broken into smaller groups to cover as many subjects as possible.

The day itself

This years theme was ‘Innovate to Elevate: Get future ready by embracing technology and sustainability’

The day started with a panel discussion for all attendees on the main theme, with smaller break-out sessions to follow which were split into three segments

• Sustainability
• Technology
• Entrepreneurship

Which covered topics like ‘Sustainable Marketing Strategies’, Impactful Communication of Sustainability’ and ‘The impact of technology and sustainability’.

Attending the sustainability sessions allowed RAJA to connect with companies with similar environmental aspirations to share best practice and collaborate on actions. It was also the first year where they held an initial ‘Unconference’. In the morning participants proposed topics of discussion on a whiteboard on things they would be interested in. At lunch, the participants voted for their favourite topics with the top 5 sessions being run. These session were a round circle discussion where attendees discussed the topic at hand, the challenges and what resolutions could be found. These prompts lead to us discussing ‘The Internet of Green Things’ and ‘Tackling Employee Burnout’.

The day ended with a networking session to sum-up takeaways for the day and discuss additional topics that could be considered for future event days.

“It was a really interesting day of getting to talk to other businesses,”said Philip “We got to see what other businesses are trying to improve and give advice for those starting out. In particular, we helped other local businesses who are trying to start up with charity work and contributions to the community. Really looking forward to coming back next year!”