A POSTGRAD student has scooped £10,000 to develop an innovative business which uses behavioural technology to improve communication between manufacturers, retailer and customers.

Chris O’Hare’s digital platform Checkpoint streamlines communications, with real-time analysis of customer demand.

The student, 26, from Patcham was named the University of Sussex’s top young entrepreneur, beating off more than 50 contestants to win the 2015 StartUp Sussex Award.

Studying for a degree in IT with business management, Chris will use the £10,000 prize money to hire more staff at his fledgling marketing agency Hare.Digital, which has already created five jobs, while Checkpoint will move to the university’s Sussex Innovation Centre (SInC).

He said: “Aside from the money, this competition gives young people the confidence to grow a business from scratch, to get the answers to those questions that you can’t answer on your own, to know whether you have a viable business. You need that confidence to go forward.”

A second prize of £5,000 went to George Lengyel, 23, who invented Geonet, a location-based social media app which connects users to people with similar interests, already available on android.

He said: “Geonet connects students with people around them so they don’t feel so isolated.

“It groups geographically relevant people together automatically, allowing you to broadcast messages to people who are relevant to you, who are doing what you are doing, but who you don’t already know.”

In third place, winning £2,500, was Nick Musto, a second-year maths and economics undergraduate, whose ClubRadar smartphone app helps students spend less at clubs and bars.

The awards were presented by Apprentice finalist Bianca Miller at the university last Tuesday.

Bianca, who is a graduate of the University of Sussex and managing director of her own start-up, personal branding enterprise Be Group, said: “Having a dream is by definition something you want to do, be or have very much.

“There are people who make things happen, people who watch things happen and people who wonder what happened.

“The way to start turning dreams into reality is to write them down and convert them into something tangible, which sets the subconscious mind into planning mode.”

Mike Herd, executive director of the SInC since it was founded 19 years ago, said: “There is a thirst for knowledge to understand how to be more entrepreneurial. One of the great things about Brighton is it keeps so many of its graduates in the city, so if we embed that entrepreneurial culture within those graduates then they bring that zeal, and new businesses and new enterprise into the city.

“Brighton is really capturing that creativity it has always been known for, but actually putting some of that entrepreneurial ‘oomph’ behind it as well.

“A lot of the investors we work with now, are people that we worked with creating companies a few years ago, and they’re now coming back and recycling that money, and that is driving ambition and driving new businesses.”

More than 80% of start-ups the Innovation Centre supports turn a profit, and a quarter go on to become multimillion pound businesses.