Student Teams Create Water Bottle Innovations as Part of Global Entrepreneurship Week
WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The organizers of the first-ever Global Entrepreneurship Week announced the winners of the Global Innovation Tournament, hosted by Stanford University. Around the world, more than 300 student teams had only four days to create as much value as possible from water bottles and convey the results in a short YouTube™ video.
The Global Innovation Tournament is a fast and furious "Apprentice-style" competition that encourages students to work in teams, challenge assumptions, seize opportunities and be creative. More than 50 institutions and 1,200 students in more than a dozen countries participated in this year’s tournament.
“This competition achieved what Global Entrepreneurship Week was all about &ndash it gave students a taste of what it is like to be entrepreneurial,” said Bo Fishback, vice president of Entrepreneurship at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a founding sponsor of the Week. “If these innovative teams could create value from an object that typically winds up in a landfill, while working with constraints such as limited time and resources, imagine what they could do dedicating themselves to full-time entrepreneurship.”
The “Best Overall” Award went to “Bottled Solutions, Inc.” of Olin College of Engineering and Babson College for the team’s creation of a Web site and ongoing campaign encouraging people to share water bottle reuse ideas. The winning students marketed their campaign in a clever, Al Gore-inspired spoof infomercial touting product ideas with a call-to-action. (View video)
Other winning entries included useful and potentially marketable gadgets to seal plastic bags, organize tangled electronics cables, dry socks and provide an inexpensive, dual-flush capability for toilets &ndash all from plastic water bottles. Other winners devised eco-awareness campaigns, art sculptures and low-cost, educational toys for children.
While most participants were university students, three of the winning entries came from 8th and 9th graders from Helena School District I in Montana. In true global entrepreneurship fashion, a joint team of three high school students from the Loudoun County Public School’s Academy of Science in Virginia and five high school students from Singapore’s Hwa Chong Institution won the Extreme Collaboration Award.
The Stanford Technology Ventures Program created the Global Innovation Tournament competition, which the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network, a federation of more than a dozen organizations across Stanford University, hosted. Past versions of the competition involved Post-It Notes® and rubber bands.
Local hosts conducted the competition in their respective areas, chose local winners and submitted them to Stanford University. The Stanford Entrepreneurship Network then coordinated global judging by a panel of Stanford representatives, entrepreneurs, and senior executives from companies such as Deloitte, Logitech and CBS Interactive.
A complete list of global and Stanford winners, including links to their videos, is available at www.unleashingideas.org/globalinnovation.
About Global Entrepreneurship Week
With the goal to inspire young people to embrace innovation, imagination and creativity, Global Entrepreneurship Week encouraged youth to think big, turn their ideas into reality, and make their mark. From Nov. 17-23, 2008, millions of young people around the world joined a growing movement to generate new ideas and seek better ways of doing things. More than 15,000 activities occurred in 78 countries around the world. Global Entrepreneurship Week was founded by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Make Your Mark campaign; sponsored by NYSE Euronext, IBM and Ernst & Young; and, supported by JA Worldwide, Endeavor, Entrepreneurs’ Organization, DECA, YPO-WPO, National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, Young Americas Business Trust, YES - European Confederation of Young Entrepreneurs, Department for Business Enterprise & Regulatory Reform, AIESEC, Youth Employment Services, The Prince’s Youth Business International. To view a complete list of participating countries and organizations or to learn more, visit www.unleashingideas.org.
About the Stanford Technology Ventures Program
The Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) is the entrepreneurship center at Stanford University's School of Engineering. STVP is focused on advancing business skills and research insights that will help entrepreneurial leaders use innovations to solve major world problems, with an emphasis on the environment, human health, information technology, and other global issues. STVP creates scholarly research on technology-based firms and teaches entrepreneurship skills to students across campus. STVP’s outreach programs include a free podcast and video Web site featuring entrepreneurial thought leaders (http://ecorner.stanford.edu) and conferences for entrepreneurship educators worldwide. http://stvp.stanford.edu
About the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network
Serving as a single point of contact for entrepreneurship at Stanford University, the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network (SEN) is a federation of nearly 20 entrepreneurship-related organizations across campus that conduct research, teach and/or provide outreach services. Most of the member organizations serve not just Stanford students, the Stanford community and Silicon Valley, but also other students and members of the entrepreneurial ecosystem worldwide. SEN also serves as a forum for communication and collaboration among its member organizations. http://sen.stanford.edu
