Mandy Haberman is a UK entrepreneur and inventor of the AnywayUp Cup®, the world’s first non-spill cup for children. She was recognised by HM Queen Elizabeth as a ‘Pioneer to the Life of the Nation’ in 2003 and named ‘British Female Inventor of the Year’ in 2000. 

Mandy had her hands full being a full-time wife and mother of two. However, when her third child Emily was born with Stickler’s Syndrome, a congenital condition that made it difficult for her to suck and feed properly, Mandy realised that she was going to have to find a solution if she wanted to bring her baby home from hospital.

Frustratingly Mandy discovered that there were no products on the market that helped babies with sucking problems to feed. She decided that she had no other option but to invent a solution. She began improvising with pieces of rubber and elastic bands at her kitchen table and managed to create a device that enabled Emily to feed. Mandy became determined to produce a proper prototype that would help other families too. After writing to hundreds of organisations for help, Mandy raised £20,000 to get a proper prototype made. She set up her own firm and began marketing the Haberman Feeder by mail order to hospitals and parents, helping the families of other children with similar conditions to Emily. The Haberman Feeder is now used in hospitals worldwide.

When Monif Clarke initially launched her plus size clothing range in 2006, she would pitch her design ideas to the major retailers, only to be told again and again that no-one would purchase her clothing: it was too trendy, too colorful, too sexy and their plus sized customers weren’t that fashion conscious.

It’s common knowledge that Google is one of the most desired employers in the world. Yet, a startup project made the Brazilian MIT student Isabel Pesce Mattos drop out of both Google and MIT. And it seems it wasn’t such a bad idea. The startup she joined is called Lemon, and reportedly raised no less than $10 million in funding thanks to its receipt tracking app (see our review).

It’s not a story about luck or privilege; Isabel Pesce’s trajectory is a shining example of determination against all odds.

Unlike many of her fellow students, Isabel wasn’t raised to join a top American university. She only found out about MIT’s program for foreigners two weeks before the deadline, she remembers, laughing.

Necessity drives women to start their own businesses in developing countries, new research from Babson College finds. In more-developed countries, 72 percent of women started businesses because they saw an opportunity for entrepreneurship.

The findings, reported in the Babson Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2010 Women's Report, show that more than 104 million women between the ages of 18 and 64 were involved in starting new businesses in 59 countries in 2010. In addition, as of 2010, another 83 million women had owned their own businesses for at least three years.