Make Your Mark Blog

It was worth me battling with delayed trains to get to the rainy and windswept city of Canterbury last week since it played host to some of Kent’s most innovative and enterprising young people last week.

The University of Kent organised a competition that brought together schools, Further Education Colleges and University students together to use their enterprise skills to solve a challenge.

The challenge was:

“to develop a blue print for a sustainable community town, one that will retain our towns and Cities unique community spirit. Your blue print can be a generic plan for a new community or you can focus on your own local town or City.”

What emerged were a series of thought-through and integrated plans using enterprise as the basis of social and physical regeneration. Responses to the challenge were unlike many conventional enterprise competitions; instead of coming up with fantasy money-spinning projects, students were challenged to put together a considered set of ideas that looked at the relationship between business, community, culture and city infrastructure.

The panel of judges included someone from Kent County Council who was so impressed with students that he’s invited the winning team to present their ideas to councillors! Some of the teams may go on to start enterprise clubs at their schools which will be a great way to push their ideas further.

It was a truly Kenterprising day (geddit??)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Innovation, Make Your Mark Clubs. 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.