Impulse Enterprise
& Innovation Studio

UWE Bristol Faculty of Environment and Technology Enterprise Studios

“An Enterprise Studio is a space within a department that creates a bridge for students between their academic course and the industry they will eventually work in… These opportunities enrich the student experience and prepare them for work at a level not normally possible through curricular or part-time work”
Carina McLane / ESN (2016)

Enterprise and Innovation studios were an initiative between 2015-2019, within the Faculty of Environment and Technology (FET) at UWE Bristol, set-up through the use of HEFCE's Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF). Their primary goal was to enhance the student experience around employability and professional skills development in undergraduate students through authentic, often paid, real-world projects and business engagements via co-curricular, non credit-baring activities. They differ from traditonal enterprise activities in that they are run by industry active academic staff who pull in their network, practice and expertise to create unique projects and opportunities for both staff and student development.

The programme was pioneered in the Games Technology BSc and MSc degree programmes in 2015 with their serious games studio PlayWest. The programme was expanded to trial different subject areas, including audio and music technology programmes in 2016. This expansion eventually led to the creation of the Enterprise Studio Network and later Foundry as part of the government funded Institute of Coding initiative. You can read more about these projects here.

Creating an Audio & Music Technology Studio

Impulse (originally named StudioWest) was developed and founded by Luke Reed and Dr Chris Nash in 2016 and was designed to address the lack of placement and professional development opportunities in the audio industries.

It uniquely analyzed the graduate destinations of the degree programmes and tailored its activities to cover the diverse range of destinations, contexts and skills. The studio used four coordinated streams:

  • CREATE - supporting creative practice, professional musicianship and sound design.
  • PRODUCE - supporting studio, live and broadcast engineering and technical practice.
  • RESEARCH - supporting future academic and research practice through exploratory projects
  • DEVELOP - supporting new technologies, consultancies and start-ups.

100% of the students who worked with Impulse went onto successful professional careers in the audio industry many of which with project partners.

The impulse studio ran for 3 years and in that time delivered over 80 unique student projects and experiences including ROLI hackathons with the Audio Developers Conference, 360 VR films with the Bristol Music Trust, audio hardware design with SquidSoup, and pilot content with BBC Radio 4 / BBC Introducing. It was eventually superseeded by the Foundry in 2019 and Prevail Festival in 2021.

You can read further details on the original StudioWest pitch and background research in our full application document.