Make Your Mark Blog

I arrived on the early train from London to Leeds rather bleary eyed yesterday morning and was met with the energy and enthusiasm of the students at Parklane College taking part in the Ideas Igloo roadshow.

Groups of students approached us at the giant inflatable Make Your Mark Ideas Igloo with curiosity and loads of questions “What’s this all about?” What do we have to do?” “Can I really win £150 from my idea?”… The ideas wall was quickly covered in ideas..

From quirky to practical, creative to techie, it really was innovation in action. The ten students with the best ideas got to pitch in front of a dragons den panel including Emily Cummins (ethical inventor) Alex Tew (of Million Dollar homepage fame) and Jonathan Hall ( who runs his own record label in Leeds).

What impressed me the most was that their business ideas, that they may have only come up with that morning, suddenly started to grow and you could see them get excited talking about it and answering questions from the judges.  Alex Tew gave them some great tips on taking their ideas forward - and one of them was get out there and talk to people about your idea, there is no point keeping it in your head! And they were definitely listening  -  already there are some posts from the students on Connect me looking for advice from the Make Your Mark Connectors!

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Entrepreneurship, Innovation. 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.