Personal statement

I am a Teaching Associate within the Department of Design, Manufacture and Engineering Management, an Enterprise Fellow in the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship and Founder & Director of my own business, VH Innovation Ltd. 

]VH Innovation Ltd, originated as a final year design project when I was a student at Strathclyde University. I originally developed our product, Recoil Kneepads, as part of my final year design project. I was inspired to help my dad, Gordon, who suffers from arthritis and painful joints, which he believes has been caused by his lifelong career as a joiner. After a dinner table conversation in 2012 where he complained of problems with his knees and existing knee pads, I came up with a redesign of the traditional kneepad which reduces pressure on the knee by up to 76%, which was a 20% improvement against the next best competitor.

After securing funding through business start-up competitions in 2013 including, The nationwide Santander Universities Entrepreneurship Awards (1st prize) and the Scottish Governments Young Innovators Challenge run by The Scottish Institute for Enterprise, I began work on what became a 3-year development cycle before launching Recoil to the market in June 2016.

In 2017 I was awarded a prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering Fellowship in London to grow and scale the business internationally.

Following success with bringing my product to market and the experiences that gave me, I returned to The University of Strathclyde in 2019 in a part time Teaching Associate role, to teach various design and entrepreneurship classes and share knowledge with other future entrepreneurs. Further to this motivation, in September 2020, I began a further role as an Enterprise Fellow within the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship. The vision of the Enterprise Fellow role was to bring practicing entrepreneurs into the classroom, to work alongside academic staff, to bring real world examples of theoretical knowledge to enhance the teaching experience for students. I hold one of these roles based on the experience I have with my external entrepreneurial ventures out with the University.

My personal areas of interest are:

• product development
• start-up business
• entrepreneurship
• entrepreneurial mindsets