Case-study

Sustainability and entrepreneurship with We Job Box: the Digital Futures Accelerator

Employability Programme | Digital Futures | February 2026 Two sessions in a day, twenty-five young people each, on a DSIT-funded programme evaluated by Aston University.

James Marr 27 August 2026 · 1 min read

Gloved hands working bamboo tubes at the bench

On 11 February 2026 we delivered a Sustainability and Entrepreneurship session on the We Job Box Digital Futures Immersive Accelerator — twice in one day, to twenty-five young people each time.

The programme

Digital Futures is a work-experience programme funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and independently evaluated by Aston University. It puts young people in front of employers in the sectors the government has identified as having skills shortages. On the day we delivered alongside Irwin Mitchell, Chelsea FC, the NHS, LSEG, BBC Children in Need, the University of Edinburgh and the Chartered Insurance Institute.

Gloved hands working bamboo tubes at a bench — The argument in one picture: a material that grew, cut and joined by hand.

The session

Sustainability and entrepreneurship are usually taught as separate subjects. A bamboo bicycle is a decent argument that they are the same subject.

The material is grown rather than mined. The frame is built by the person who will ride it. The business case and the environmental case turn out to be the same case — and you can put both in front of a room in an afternoon. The session took the group through why bamboo, what it can and cannot do, and how a frame is designed and joined; then into the harder question: if this is the product, what is the business, who is the customer, and what would it take to make it work?

A bamboo frame kit laid out flat — Every part of a frame kit, laid out — where a sustainability lesson becomes a product and a business model.

What happened next

The follow-up mattered more than the day. We sent a debrief afterwards, and the reply set up everything that followed:

"I would most definitely like to build on the programme and work with you."
Lalita Taylor, Founder, We Job Box

Building on it meant two considerably more ambitious commissions four months later — an applied psychology workshop for undergraduates at Aston University, and a design sprint with the University of Surrey. Between them those two June sessions reached 44 undergraduates across two universities in a single quarter.

Part of our work with We Job Box: the green day challenge (Oct 2025) · sustainability & entrepreneurship (Feb 2026) · applied psychology at Aston (Jun 2026) · a design sprint with the University of Surrey (Jun 2026).