Entrepreneur Priya Lakhani, at the opening of the Start-up Lounge, a facility for teaching enterprise and entrepreneurship skills at City College. Picture: Denise Bradley

Students are being promised a new hands on approach to learning about businesses with the launch of the City College Norwich’s new StartUp Lounge.

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City College Norwich has spent nearly £1m creating its “StartUp Lounge” a state of the art facility featuring designed to help the college’s 14,000 students develop the skills needed to set up their own businesses or give them the edge when it comes to getting a job.

With its giant flatscreen computers and innovative ideas walls where students to start to sketch out business ideas, the aim is to create a hi-tech environment where business ideas can be formed and then developed and there is even a Dragon’s Den style studio where students can practice making pitches to potential investors.

Friday’s official opening which featured speeches from Gazelle entrepreneurs Priya Lakhani and Ben Ramsden, saw students present their business ideas during a special market place.

College principal Dick Palmer said the StartUp Lounge was a “stake in the ground” sitting alongside the new Gazelle initiative, which is being backed by the college and four other colleges across the country to work with leading entrepreneurs to help embed an “entrepreneurial mindset” among young people.

“This isn’t a space to read about entrepreneurship,” he said. “We are not going to be doing MBAs, it’s a place to create an enterprise. We want students to experience what’s involved in starting up a business.”

Ben Ramsden, founder of the Pants to Poverty ethical clothing brand said the StartUP Lounge was an inspirational facility and was the start of an “entrepreneurial evolution” which would spread across the country.

“For me entrepreneurship is very much a way of life,” he said. “Entrepreneurial education is the thing that will help turn Britain around in a magnificent way.”

Priya Lakhani, who gave up a career as a barrister to set up a business Masala Masala producing fresh Indian cooking sauces, said: “I am quite overwhelmed at this whole space, it’s not what I was expecting at all, it’s absolutely incredible.”

Mr Palmer said that 1,000 students had already used the facilities in the lounge six business ideas had emerged which students were looking to develop.

And the facility was already proving popular with students.

Coll Matska, one of founders of Interim Records and Interim Media, a record label set up by a group of four students, said: “It will be incredibly useful to people with ideas, but who don’t know where to go for finance.”

Tom Hollick, president of the college’s student union, said: “I think it’s fantastic. It’s a whole new approach to education and getting students involved. Rather than just going through education and then trying to get a job, it’s giving students a proper entrepreneurial foundation.”