Idea Idol ‘Finale’

The mash-up of two popular tv shows Dragon's Den and Pop Idol that was the 'Finale' of Idea Idol rocked Oxford last night for the third year running.

This event set eight finalists — six commercial enterprises and two charitable organisations — in head-to-head 'elevator pitches' to a panel of four judges for a total prize money of £12,000.

The selected ideas were pretty varied, ranging from designer cast covers and slings (the eventual winner) through a student betting website and feedback-responsive keyboards to grand visions of private initiative overhauls of NHS blood analysis. Refreshingly there was a complete lack of web2.0 ideas (blogging, IM, and podcasting still yet to be moulded into commercial ideas it seems, Yahoo buyouts excluded), the betting website being perhaps the only idea verging on the vacuous, and the word 'synergy' was mentioned only once (yes, by an MBA student).

Sadly, but maybe predictably, the use of Powerpoint slides by practically all of the contestants was shocking: some fell into the trap of having slides and slides of detailed bullets (unforgivable really in a five minute pitch) and others seem to be taking the new web2.0 wave of clear bold colourful designs to new levels (or had they just made their slides in a shorter time than it took to give their presentation). Over all, one presenter had no graphic aids, one team just had a map, and four pitches used one overhead with just title.

Perhaps disappointing too was the number of MBA business development projects in the final. These were obviously team efforts directed towards developing full business plans, and all certainly gave the most polished and best directed talks. But I thought these went against the nature of the Idea Idol competition of giving people with little business background the chance to consider their mettle and pitch. There were apparently 75 entries altogether and it would have been nice to see some more promising undergraduates up there (the blood analysis and casino guys were the only UGs, if I remember correctly). A little nurturing of the contestants, if possible, could have dramatically improved their pitches and everyone's take-home experience of the contest. Even if the organisers had just sent a five minute email to all the entrants — or just finalists — explaining the sort of process that might be successful, then great ideas, such as feedback keyboard, could have been given much better wings to fly on. In these respects the contest was very different to last year, which I'm sure had a number of great pitches from undergraduates, e.g., BOSO, who won that year.

Full round-up

Commercial Enterprise Winner: Medical Style LLC [Jennifer Segal et al.] (£5000 prize)
Commercial Enterprise Runner-up: Carbon-Market.com (£2000)
Social Enterprise Winner: 'HIV & AIDS Prevention' (£3000).
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Update: A news article on the Said Business School website gives more details of other entries:

Submissions included: ‘club-guru.com’ – an internet service to organize your nightlife; ‘The Parking Space and Vehicle Finder’ – to help find the last available parking spot and remind us of where we parked on our return; ‘The Throne’ – a revolutionary portable lavatory; ‘Do-it-yourself Garage’ with tools, mechanics and refreshments on tap; ‘Virtual Boycott’ for those with a great deal to get off their chests; and ‘Oops I drank too much’ – a miracle cure to get you back in the game after over-indulgence.

Game Changer: Anita Roddick – Business as Unusual

Anita Roddick spoke yesterday at Said Business School as part of Oxford Entrepreneur’s Game Changers series.

In a very different occasion to Alan Sugar’s appearance earlier this term, she gave a polished empassionated talk, as might be expected, as this event appeared to be part of her latest book tour.

She started by very fairly turning on the OE’s obsession with the term ‘entrepreneur’. Describing herself as an activist and agitator, she talked of the media’s unbounded obsession with the phrase, the success of which only seems to be measured by profit alone. People were confusing entrepreneurship with opportunism, and success was inflated and depressing.

Challenge Everything

Dame Anita is trying to help the World enter a new era where money is not the end. An entrepreneur, as she sees them, should be more of a social change agent than a business person; following a calling, not a career. They should be like a crazy person and believe the idea so passionately that they talk about it in the present tense; they will it into existence with the zealousness of a religious convert. She admitted that she has learnt a lot from Quaker business models.

The four key things are:
1) Idea
2) Self
3) Money is necessary to make it happen, but should not be the motivator; it is more about freedom [although not as we learnt later in her case with Body Shop's public floatation]
4) INTEGRITY

Critical is the belief that anything is possible; essentially patholigically creative; vomitting ideas.

Bravely she dismissed society’s love of business schools, which she saw as being controlling and obsessed with the status quo. What she wanted was a marketplace for feedback and ideas. Her idea: being twenty times bigger is not a goal; being better by being values-led is. This is why the Body Shop, for her at least, was a conduit for areas and issues she believed in.

Talking about the Body Shop, she told us of its beginnings: her husband, Gordon, was about to leave to travel through America on a donkey, and founding the business was a way of securing financial well-being for her family. The first shop was in Brighton, in an out of the way location, but drew a committed customer-base: it had to, as it was on a road full of undertakers (apparently). Her early — and continued — success is in part due to her uncoventional, inexpensive, eye-catching marketing techniques, what she describes as guerilla marketing. She saw standard marketing as ineffective: we are all nowadays very over-marketed too, and thus have become very cynical. However, working with NGOs she was able to target an idealistic sort of consumer. She described the best marketing as the one that your competitions is either unwilling or unable to follow.

“We were searching for employees but people turned up instead.”

But it is clear that her consumers are not the most important people in all this to her. It’s her employees. She expressed sadness that businesses are no longer about job creation, only wealth creation. The Body Shop seems to be a conduit not just for her, but she thinks that it’s critical to empower her employees; nothing being more motivating as the chance to express their idealism.

Then it came down to her leadership style.

Leadership is Communication

There is no more powerful an institution than business; so it has to assume a moral leadership. It’s most effective tool is communication, integral to which is the language of leadership: community involvement and social justice. Activism, she claimed, is the price we pay for being on this planet.

UPDATE: The Independent on Sunday has an interesting profile of Dame Anita in light of l’Oreal’s rumoured bid for the Body Shop.
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Music-Podcasting

This idea may be unoriginal but what about a podcasting service for unsigned bands? Wouldn’t people subscribe to a daily podcast of new and interesting music from exciting fresh bands?

With feedback about what previous tunes you liked, a tivo-esque podcast suited to your tastes could be built up.

That could be podmusic.us.
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CoComment

One of the latest Web2.0 startups, and one of the few with an original, well-executed idea, is CoComment, who kindly offer to track and aggregate all your comments scattered across the Blogosphere.

I’ll add to this when I’ve built up a hefty wad of inane unfunny missives myself.
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Idea Idol 2006

The countdown to Idea Idol 2006* has really begun in earnest.

This competition is really the showcase of the Oxford Entrepreneurship* Society, where simple ideas can be pitched to judges in an attempt to win up to £5,000. A sort of Dragon’s Den for back-of-the-envelope fantasies.

Last year’s winners included Boso.co.uk, the first (they say) online student marketplace, which has received a wealth of high-level national media coverage.

The Final is on the 27th February at the Said Business School. The finalists were due to be announced on the 4th of this month, but I suspect that something has gone wrong with the administration, because on the 12th people were asked to resubmit their ideas, suggesting that entries were lost (or not submitted?).

Let’s look forward to the canapes, anyway!

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* Note about the links: apologies to sensitive souls for including those links, but I include them for good reason. The websites, which — in case you’re too scared to see yourself — fall into some of the easy traps of Flash (not at all Web2.0):

Fancy transitions, colour effects and fonts are easily seen as a synonym for good design. It’s a common aphorism that 80% of the users of MS Office use only 20% of the features (or at least it should be if we follow an interpretation of Pareto’s rule), but I think we could easily formulate one for Flash, namely:

80% of the users of Flash should only use 20% of its features;

or going further:

You’ll be right 80% of the time if you only use Flash 20% of the time you’re tempted to.

Hard to find content. The site has a clear menu, but it’s hard to find what you’re looking for and to leap from one bit to the next. Of course, none of it is actual text (presumably people of limited sight or using older machines can’t have ideas). For example, while writing this I knew I had seen a page of previous winners, but couldn’t find it again for ages.

MUSIC! The web was never intended to be a multi-sensory experience.

Now this may all seem harsh — and I don’t want to get into a CrunchNotes/Fooky-esque debacle — but I’ve resisted making blink tag gags and I fully accept that I made all these mistakes back in the 90s, before the World had speeded on into Web2.0 clarity. The issue is that OE is supposed to represent a dynamic professional bunch of people, and that is not what bouncewithit.com and ideaidol.com suggest. Sorry.
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Best…ad…ever

Best…ad…ever: Ellen Feiss Switch Ad.

If you don’t remember back to 2002, Wikipedia can come to your rescue, although Wired has a good contemporary summary of her rise to stardom.
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Comedy Central Frustrations

Not only does Comedy Central, which provides my quad-weekly Colbert Report fix, offer different interfaces to browsers, but it refuses to work with Flip4Mac, the WMV-QT plug-in.

The only solution at present seems to be to disable the plug-in in the Flip4Mac Preference pane.
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Strange Fact

Strange fact: there are no words in that OED that end in “sius”, apart from two foreign names (Celsius and Cassius). Struck me as unexpected. But then most things do past 1am, I find.
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Web2.0 Logos

Thinking about a logo for my new business ideas … Web2.0 Logos
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FIB 2006

FIB have announced some more of their line-up for this Summer's festival. In addition to the history-making electronic pop of Depeche Mode, we will be joined by the vibrant pop of both Franz Ferdinand and The Rakes, the unmistakable sounds of Echo And The Bunnymen and the smooth elegance of Jay-Jay Johanson.

Franz Ferdinand, of course, appeared during the wonderful FIB 2004, when they were a strong up-and-coming act among a musical "sky of stars". The line-up for 2006 is, though, looking as weak as that for 2005, but it is always difficult to tell, with the very drawn out process of confirming/announcing acts.

Doubtless there will be continued speculation on the eFestivals forums.
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