Make Your Mark Blog

On Monday the 17^th of November thousands of students from schools across the country participated in the Make Your Mark challenge. A secret business brief was unveiled at 9:00am challenging students to come up with a creative and innovative new enterprise using the Olympic and Paralympic values as inspiration. The teams of the nationwide competition are in with a chance of winning the £3000 top prize, but this is no mean feat with the initial competition round at the school level followed by regional and national finals!.

I  had the pleasure of going to the City of London Academy in Southwark to see how the students faired under the pressure of a real life business challenge. There were two groups, the 13-15yrs and the 16-19yrs both with six teams in each comprised of approximately four team members. The initial 9pm start saw a multitude of yawns and wariness as the students anticipated what they had let themselves in for! However within under an hour the creativity was flowing and an array of fantastic ideas were being hastily scribbled down on their ‘Ideas sheet’. It was great to see young people getting passionate about enterprise; they had invested their ideas and taken ownership of the potential businesses.

Once the groups had chosen their preferred idea they began to flesh it out into a real business plan, focusing on competitors, marketing plans, promotional concepts, revenue streams, expansion strategies and even price discrimination! The apparent business acumen and aptitude of the students at The City of London Academy was impressive to say the least and the final stage of the competition was immensely tough. The groups had to pitch their ideas in five minutes to the panel of judges, who decided on the winner on the strength of their performance.

Congratulations to winners and good luck in the regional final!

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Global Entrepreneurship Week. 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.