News » General

Sowing the Seeds

An exciting new enterprise competition to inspire and encourage the spirit of entrepreneurship at a young age.

	The students visited Hamlin Electronics in Diss

The Norfolk network has launched an exciting new competition "Sowing the Seeds" involving Year 9 students (13-14 year olds) from Blyth Jex and Costessey High Schools. Our aim is to inspire and encourage young people to think about self-employment and running a business at an early age. BT, our founder sponsor is sponsoring this project.

Twelve students were selected from 200 students in their year group, from each of the schools. These students scored highly in an initial questionnaire which identified the students with most entrepreneurial characteristics, who then completed a formal application form and attended an interview to win a place in the competition.

Each school will form two groups of six students and each team will have to dream up and develop an innovative product and create a marketing strategy. They will present their findings to a panel of senior business people at a grand finale at the BT Research and Development Centre during Enterprise week in November.

Feeling winners already the final 24 students proudly started the competition in July by taking a trip to the Customer Experience Centre at Adastral Park, BT's research and development centre. They were warmly welcomed as important technology advisers by the BT team and were introduced to broadband and convergent technology in the home, on the move and at work. They were greatly inspired by seeing the wired appliances in an intelligent kitchen; 3D TV; the state of the art bank with latest customer channels including biometrics, intelligent cameras, digital media and video conferencing; and marvelled at the capabilities of Radio Frequency Identification ( RFID).

After absorbing all this technology the students were set a challenge to work together in small teams to dream up an innovative product based on the technology they had just seen and to give an off-the-cuff presentation to the whole group. This didn't daunt them in the least and they rose to the challenge superbly, exceeding all our expectations. They showed excellent team work, communication and presentation skills and some of the products were ingenious - take the "SmellyVision" for example, an advancement on the 3D TV - it creates smell to advertise perfume and food products.

The next stage was a visit behind the scenes at Hamlin Electronics in Diss in July. Hamlin's senior Engineer Design Team put together a superb morning's programme chaperoning the students around the design factory to see all the processes involved in designing, developing and manufacturing innovative products. Back in the design office students were able to look at cad drawings, research Hamlin's key markets, and learn about quality control standards. It was wonderful opportunity to see all the different aspects of an innovative global engineering company and we all appreciated the superb air con on such a sweltering hot day! Enormous thanks to Hamlin for their hospitality.

The hard graft will start when the students return from the summer holiday and start working in their teams to create and develop their product and marketing stategy. NN will be running two learning days concentrating on marketing, finance, selling, presentation and communication skills and will be organising mentoring sessions. This will prepare the teams for the grand finale which takes place on November 16th during Enterprise week. NN is already working with BT to build national media coverage for this event.

Posted: 9th Aug 2006