A team of students from the University of Glamorgan are taking part in a most unusual global competition: in just eight days they have created innovative solutions to a mystery challenge using very limited resources, and put their results in a short video posted to YouTube
Called the Global Innovation Tournament, the competition is organised by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) at Stanford University.
The team from University of Glamorgan will now go forward to be judged amongst a select number of UK entries and winners will become semi-finalists in the global round of judging at Stanford.
An official activity of Global Entrepreneurship Week, the competition encourages students to work in teams, challenge assumptions, seize opportunities and be creative. Most of all, it gives them a taste of what it’s like to be entrepreneurial: students must have an impact while working with tight constraints, such as limited time and resources. Great ideas are not enough – they actually need to implement their ideas and deliver results. Local and then global judges will determine who has had the biggest impact during the eight days.
Past versions of this competition involved giving students a common object, such as Post-It Notes®, rubber bands, or water bottles, and challenging them to create as much value as possible from these objects in a few days. Teams invented products, raised and donated money, composed music, entertained, helped the disabled, made political statements, educated children, and much more.
Hundreds of institutions in dozens of countries have participated in the competition since its inception in 2007. The University of Glamorgan is among the more than 100 local organizers conducting the competition this year in their respective areas. The local winners in most locations will be announced during Global Entrepreneurship Week, Nov. 16–22, and global winners will be announced online on Thursday, Dec. 3, on www.unleashingideas.org. This site has now changed to genglobal.org.
“The University of Glamorgan is renowned across Europe for its enterprise education, and this competition gives a chance for our students to build on what they learn in classes.” said Dr. Gary Packham (Director of Center for Enterprise). “This competition challenges students to create something from nothing, and the team at Glamorgan will be competing at the highest level with renowned universities across the world in this fast-paced entrepreneurship immersion experience.”
“This is the fourth time we’ve run this competition, and the results are always astounding,” said Tina Seelig, executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and creator of the competition. “An event like this demonstrates just how much entrepreneurial potential there is among our young people and how much they are capable of achieving when given permission to do so.”
This competition is only the beginning of thousands of celebrations that will mark Global Entrepreneurship Week, which was co-founded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in the United States and Make Your Mark campaign in the United Kingdom. More than 75 countries are preparing a variety of innovative activities and challenges.
To help improve the Glamorgan team’s chances of winning view their entry Money Globe on YouTube
