People

Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon MBE is the founder of Stemettes; a social enterprise that motivates young girls to take up Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. The award-winning enterprise has since empowered over 40,000 girls to realise their potential, changing the future of technology in a landscape currently dominated by an overwhelmingly male workforce.

What’s your favourite thing about the BIPC?

When I was younger, I knew the Business & IP Centre was a place you could go to do research and start a business, so I actually signed up with a dating business I was starting with my best mate. We would go there and do market research and access all of the stuff there for free. But it was also a space to come to and sit down, concentrate and focus on what we were trying to do.

What made you want to be a BIPC Ambassador?

For me, being an Ambassador is cool because this is the space I used to come and do bits and pieces in, and now I’m someone who has built a business and can support and encourage other people to use that resource.

Advice you would give a business owner just starting out on their journey?

Advice borrowed from Grace Hopper: 'It is better to seek forgiveness than it is to seek permission'. And what this means is, don’t be like, oh do I have the qualifications to run a dating business? Just say no I’m going to do it, buy the domain, set it all up and get it done. If you start asking others for permission then they’ll inevitably say no, and that’s not useful.

Your most surreal moment in business?

There are a lot of people I ended up meeting that I never would’ve imagined meeting when I was a kid, whether it was being at Buckingham Palace with the Queen or whether it was being sat at a lunch table with Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia, Tim Berners-Lee who invented the web and Boris Johnson, this was at the first lunch for London Tech Week. 

Most likely to be found at/in…

I’m most likely to be found at home, I genuinely want to be a hermit. My word of the year for 2020 was JOMO, joy of missing out. 

^{Photo credit Sam and Sam Photography 2022}