Reinvigorating entrepreneurial spirit among young people

The Big Ideas ICT Youth Challenge is a NESTA-funded competition, encouraging young people to turn their promising ICT ideas into commercially viable business models. Competition judge, Simon Roberson, explains how the challenge benefits young people, companies and the North East.

What are the judges looking for at the Big Ideas ICT Youth Challenge?

The starting point is for an idea that it is both credible and interesting. The quality lies in ideas that are technically innovative and marketable. We're not expecting, at this stage, for people to come up with fully-formed gizmos and business plans.

We'd then be looking for evidence of how the team has taken their original idea and developed it; the skills they've used; how they worked as a team; how enterprising they've been in terms of testing and developing the idea.

What happens next?

At the initial stages it's just an outline. The later stage, called 'hot-housing', is where the judges help people to develop their ideas over a few days. One or two of the people involved in the judging process will mentor the group in developing their ideas.

They'll ask them 'have you thought of this' or suggest techniques or technologies to help them further develop their idea. They will also challenge them to develop their ability to communicate and think through the potential pitfalls or problems with their idea.

It's this element of interactivity that sets this competition apart. With some competitions you've got to come up with the idea and do all of the development yourself. This favours people who are naturally self-confident, eloquent and have good communication skills, not necessarily those with the best original ideas.

One of the things we like about the Big Ideas ICT Youth Challenge is the social inclusivity of it. If your basic idea is good, the competition will help you progress by providing the facilities for developing that idea - and your skills around it.

Is the overall aim to market the product or to develop and build enterprise skills?

It's more the process of getting people to think deeper about what's involved and realise that they can do it.

Being enterprising isn't just about coming up with a brilliant idea: it's all the work involved turning it into something real; the number of different skills that are involved; and the fact that there is a lot of teamwork involved.

How important do you think incentives such as competitions and prizes are in getting young people to innovate?

I think the greatest motivation is positive feedback. If people are encouraged to think, they have the ability to come up with something good and to take that forward.

In the hot-housing sessions that we've run previously, I've seen 15-year-old schoolchildren, who might be from very disadvantaged areas, or the nerdier types - the ones who are the leading figures in a lot of other school things - not only are they involved with highly skilled and expert technicians from BT and Microsoft - they're treated as equals by them. That's a very important part of the process.

Being treated like grown-ups with sensible ideas is a terrific encouragement to coming up with more ideas or just being generally more positive about things they can do with their lives.

The big benefit for companies like us in understanding how young people work, is that they're also consumers. As much as us helping them to develop their skills, we get to see what they think is a good idea.

How will this benefit the North East?

For several years the North East has been on the wrong end of the North-South divide. We've been fighting very hard to develop new industries in the North East.

There are a lot of very good new companies in industries like IT and the creative world, but they are relatively small in employment terms and in terms of economic impact on the region as a whole.

So, the North East as a region has been working very hard, public and private sector together, to develop rather than import new businesses. Those are the businesses that will stay here, grow here and create wealth, jobs and prosperity here.

This [competition] is just one small contribution to that. If we can inspire young people to think that innovation is interesting and exciting, and something in which they can succeed and build a career, then they're more likely to engage positively with their school's technology education.

The regional universities are very strong in technical subjects, and one of the big generators of future prosperity in the region will be people coming out of those universities and staying here rather than going off to London.

What kinds of people do you think will be the innovators of the future?

They've got to be difficult in some way. A lot of it's about turning innovation into business or about teamwork, but you've got to be obsessive enough to think that your idea is brilliant and to persist against all the obstacles that are put in your way.

I think that's always a bit true of innovators. As George Bernard Shaw said 'The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'

It's also about showing people that innovation is not always about the blinding flash of inspiration, you can be innovative in the way that you use things, the way that you deliver a service, not just in coming up with brilliant new technological inventions.

Simon Roberson is Regional Manager for BT Regions in the North East.

Young people will begin pitching their ideas to judges on 31 January, with the winner to be announced in July.

Published January 2007