Make Your Mark Challenge link up for Global Entrepreneurship Week
5th January 2009
London Metropolitan Business School (LMBS) and Make Your Mark Challenge (MYM) linked up this November to celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week. It was the first Enterprise Week collaboration between Make Your Mark, the University and the participating schools. Make Your Mark is a national campaign which inspires young people to realise their entrepreneurial goals.
The campaign, which has now gone global, arms young people with the
confidence, skills and ambition to be enterprising. 55,000 students
from over 1,000 organisations competed in the 2008 Challenge.
Pupils from local schools, Langdon School, East Ham, Newham and
Uxbridge College arrived at LMBS on Monday 17 November. At midnight on
the Sunday night prior to their arrival, MYM had released a challenge
to the schools, giving the pupils just a few hours to prepare to a
short Dragons’ Den- style pitch to present their ideas.
Their challenge was to come up with an entrepreneurial idea
inspired by the seven Olympic and Paralympic Values. The idea could be
a product to sell, a service to provide or a space or a place which
makes money. One or more of the values could be integrated into the
idea.
All day the MYM school teams toiled at a business concept. They
found support from London Met honorary graduate Lord Bilimoria, founder
of Cobra beer, who shared tips with them over a lunch sponsored by
Compass Scholarest. In addition, the National Council for Graduate
Entrepreneurship, Local business leaders, partners and LMBS Visiting
Professors acted as facilitators moving between the teams as sounding
blocks for their inventions. These included the Institute of Directors,
travel, communications, finance, marketing, human resources,
operations.
The internal LMBS facilitators of staff and final year students led
the school teams through the day to complete 90 second presentations to
a group of business judges. The judges were impressed at the
originality and professional level of the student input. All the
participants were presented with a LMBS Certificate of Achievement.
The winning team from Langdon School won their heat and came second in the London Regional Finals.
For more information please click here