Archive for October, 2011
Below is a SWOT anaysis for the idea I pitched for this module. This technique is used to understand the strenghts and weaknesses of your business and identify both opportunities and threats which may contribute to its success or failure.
This is a video of my 2 minute pitch. The purpose of this was to practise my pitching skills and get feedback from the group about my idea. This will also be used to compare with my 5 minute pitch later this term.
In this weeks Venture Culture session we were told about the origins of new ideas. This was to help us come up with our own ideas related to three methods of idea generation described in the lecture. These three methods were re-design, opportunity and passion:
Re-design – Most new business ideas are developments or improvements of an existing concept. Two of the most obvious and successful examples of re-design are music players to iPods and vacuum cleaners to Dyson. One other example of re-design that was brought up in the lecture was from a variation of the Rubix Cube called The Bedlam Cube. Despite not being the best example of re-design, I really liked this idea as the product can be easily personalised for any other company or event. For example, a Manchester United Bedlam Cube or a Christmas Bedlam Cube. This mehod of re-design has really given me something to think about when developing my idea for this module.
Opportunity – New or missed opportunities can form the basis of a new idea. These ideas might arise because of advancements in techology for example where a business idea may not have been possible before.
Passion – This involves developing a business idea based on something you have a real passion for. Despite this, these ideas can often struggle to fulfill the requirements of a successful business.
Even after being introduced to some other ways of generating new ideas, I am confident in continuing with my initial idea for the first part of this module. This is partly because I really struggled to come up with anything else, but mainly because I feel that my idea is within a problem area that hasn’t been fully explored and which can be signigicantly improved. Starting with a problem like this was another method of idea generation mentioned in the lecture this week. This tended to be the way I was thinking when I came up with my idea.
Following our first lecture in the Venture Culture module we were asked to come up with an idea for a product, sevice or business that could be used as a basis to work from for the first term. My initial idea is outlined below.
Lunchbox app – This idea came from a BBC News article I read a few days earlier. The article focused on how parents are failing to put enough fruit and veg in their children’s packed lunches. I therefore came up with the idea of a game-like application that teaches primary school children the importance of eating a healthy packed lunch. It would work by allowing children to input exactly what was included in their own packed lunch and give them a daily rating based on this information. As well as providing children with useful tips on healthy eating, it would also provide an opportunity to compete with their friends and therefore give them a fun incentive to eat a healthy packed lunch every day. I think this idea has a lot of potential as its clearly an area than can be improved. Online websites have previously attemped to do this, but this idea would encourage repeated use and offer a way of getting the healthy eating message across to children which they can easily relate to. Through a game.
For the first workshop in the Realtime module we have been we have been experimenting with RSS feeds to create data visualisations in Flash. Simon Lock is running this workshop and he provided us with an example to work on. This example changed the size of a red circle depending on data of the exchange rate between the pound and the dollar.
From this I made my own variation and used data from a BBC weather RSS feed to create a simple visualizer. I used the temperature figures from this RSS feed to correspond to different frames on the timeline in Flash.
Darren Gray 