Make Your Mark Blog

Has the Make Your Mark Challenge uncovered the next generation of socially minded entrepreneurs?

• Wickersley School and Sports College, Rotherham, won the schools category with ‘Truck Trackers’, for small business that need to deliver goods but cannot fill an entire truck
• The City of London School for Girls won the colleges category with ‘Cyclevision’, selling exercise bikes for gym and domestic use which generate electricity to power an in-built television
• University College of Plymouth St Mark & St John won the university category with ‘Fruit on the Roof’, an idea for growing fruit on urban roof tops

They were highlighted in our first piece of online coverage: www.theaccidentalecomaniac.com/blogcategory/green-news

The 2007 challenge, ‘Make it pay in a globalocal way’, was designed to get the teams thinking about solutions to the world’s social and environmental issues.

The teams had to come up with an idea and develop a business and marketing plan to show how it would be successful, and then pitch their idea to a panel of judges including:
• Entrepreneur Seb Bishop, who starred in Channel Four’s Millionaire’s Mission
• Levi Roots, the entrepreneur who made his name by winning the investment he needed for his product Reggae Reggae Sauce on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den
• Matt Littler, the actor who plays Max Cunningham in Hollyoaks.

The three winning teams, one each from the school, college and university categories, won £3,000 for their institution and £100 of vouchers for each team member. The second place teams won £2,000 and the third place teams £1,000.

MOBO award-winning hip-hop artist Akala hosted the finals. He said: “All the teams did amazingly well to get to the national finals, but the three winners showed the particular creativity and business understanding needed by entrepreneurs to turn their idea into reality. I really hope the Challenge has inspired a new generation of social entrepreneurs.”

And my favourite moment?! Levi Roots singing Reggae Reggae Sauce during the awards ceremony and again in the hotels corridors for his many adoring fans…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Entrepreneurship, MYM Challenge, Social enterprise. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.