Catherine Brentnall is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research has focused on enterprise competitions and competitive pedagogies, using Realist Evaluation to illuminate what works for whom and why (or not). She authored the first effects study on one-day competitions in entrepreneurship education and has translated these insights into practice, developing non-competitive models such as The Manchester Unhackathon and embedding compassionate, cooperative pedagogies in the classroom. Catherine’s work is driven by a commitment to equity and inclusion, particularly for neurodivergent learners. She challenges dominant narratives about competitions and their outcomes in entrepreneurship education, advocating for approaches that recognise diverse cognitive styles and foster environments where all students can flourish.

Based at Northumbria University, Kayleigh Watson is a researcher and educator whose work interrogates the competition-based logics underpinning entrepreneurship education. Her scholarship on coopetition reframes how nascent entrepreneurs learn — not through rivalry, but through relational, emergent collaboration. More recently, she has used Freedom of Information requests to expose the hidden architectures of competition provision in UK higher education, revealing how institutional practices overlook inclusivity and impact. This has inspired an emergent interest in exploring how competition-based initiatives impact neurodivergent entrepreneurs, advocating for more pluralistic, responsive models of support.