Doug Richard
Coming up with ideas
The ideas that work are often the most simple and straightforward. They need not even be new. Many of the most successful entrepreneurs have simply taken existing ideas and applied them in a new way or in a new field, whether that’s to give the market what it’s lacking or tackle a particular social problem.
At their heart, all ideas address a problem. What’s critical is the audience or market for the solution. You don’t have to hit that market straight away but the potential for wider impact must exist.
If you think you’ve identified the beginnings of a solution - the first step is to talk to people. Find out if they share your concerns, and what their own needs might be. More and more ideas spring from collaboration - different groups of people working together on a problem. Think about what you need to develop the idea and make it happen - is it finance, advice, specific skills, or all three?
You should also think about the people around you in terms of the skills they might feed in to the development of your idea - this is as true of a group initiative like the Big Green Challenge, where all different types of people in a community have a role to play, as it is with individual entrepreneurs, who will need to call on the support of others for issues outside of their skill-set.
Progressing an idea - whether it’s for profit or otherwise - is in many ways about finding a balance. You need to have confidence in your own vision but be willing to use others as sounding boards. You have to be willing to drive things forward and be able to draw on the expertise of others. This is especially true for the Big Green Challenge.
Why not register or login to fill out the application form now? Good luck!
What is innovation?
The Big Green Challenge aims to stimulate innovation in response to climate change, challenging people to work together to come up with new approaches that will lead to a 60% reduction of CO2 emissions in their communities. But what is innovation?
We want to encourage fresh thinking about the way we live our lives. An innovation might be a brand new idea, or it might involve combining existing ideas, technologies or approaches in a new way, or finding a way of making an existing solution more effective.
The best innovations might not be technical or scientific – they might, for example, involve reorganising processes or the way people interact, or combining a number of smaller tried-and-tested ideas into a new overall approach.
We see innovation as the successful exploitation of ideas – and those ideas don’t necessarily need to be new ones.
What interesting examples of innovation have you come across recently?
The (Big Green) Challenge for inventors
Can groups use new inventions in their entry for the Big Green Challenge? It would be great if they can but we thought there were a couple of stumbling blocks. First, really revolutionary ideas take years to become useful technology – the humble zip took decades to develop. That’s too long for the Big Green Challenge. But there might be problems for the inventor too. If they don’t have a patent or can protect their idea in other ways and it became public through the competition, then the inventor would not be able to get that protection afterwards. So the inventor might lose out.
But inventors could still enter if they want when they have – or are not bothered about – legal protection for their idea. Here’s how:
A group entering the Big Green Challenge would be a great way to test exciting new gizmos and get rid of the last bugs. So an inventor could get together with a community who use that invention and they could enter the Big Green Challenge. If that device does make a big energy saving, and the community show it could be taken up across the country, then they are well on the way to having a great entry.
