The Challenge
"Successful innovators often stay up to date on current events in order to be on the cutting edge of new developments."
"Innovation is about turning a vision into new products or services."
"Innovation also is the ability to re-imagine things that already are."
"Being innovative means doing things differently or doing things that have never been done before."
The Keeping Up with the News Challenge takes a healthy spoonful of each of these definitions of "Innovation" and "Innovators" in order to create a team-focused, entrepreneurial challenge that asks you to seek your inspiration in the news and media that surround you from day to day.
Each age- and gender-mixed team of three were given a product design challenge. Each group was given a national broadsheet and a local newspaper. From their reading of these sources, they were tasked with finding one article to inspire a new and innovative product idea. This innovation would then be explained in a team 90-second pitch to our guest judge NJT, in order to highlight the product's innovative qualities, its social and cultural necessity in relation to the chosen article, the USP it has to fill a gap in the market, and its potential as a profit-making product for future investors.
Skills Takeaway
This Innovation Challenge is rich in wider learning skills designed to enrich your experience as not only a professional in the future, but also is designed to help you become a more effective student right now.
If Innovation is all about doing new things, the core skill here develops your innovative invention processes. Being able to create new and experimental things, moving from concept to concrete design with flexibility and adaptability, was absolutely key to the success of the groups' products. Groups were certainly rewarded for being able to devise multiple products, troubleshooting, critiquing, refining and redesigning at speed and under pressure, in such a way that gives credence to Peter Brooks' theatrical axiom, "Hold on tight; let go lightly".
Further lessons central to the task were:
1. Evaluating and prioritising ideas effectively through the careful judgement of an audience's particular needs.
2. Pragmatic teamwork: by pooling skills and insights with your team and working to the group's strengths, teams found themselves at a significant advantage in creating as effective a product design as possible.
3. Pitching ideas to the brief, organising material to ensure the key information is delivered within the allocated time limit, as well as effective communication skills in delivering the pitch itself to an external judge.
Students are invited to submit a reflection on their method and procedures relating to the challenge and their learning outcomes. Winning is not the purpose of the Innovation Challenges: learning is. Reflecting on the aspects of the experience will give you the chance to realise that every experience, every success and failure, offers a chance to learn, improve and develop. The best reflection receives an award, and will be posted beneath each challenge.
Newspapers... Okay. Do I read them? Not for joy or satisfaction. Inspiration hit me? Nope. Three blank sheets of screwed up pieces of paper on the floor and what a blank page staring at me. I didn't realise a piece of paper could be so intimidating. It hasn't even a face or a voice and it's still overwhelming me.
Therefore, I slowly ramble my way through the "Huddersfield Examiner" (never heard of it before!) when Toddy pops her head through the door of the history classroom. So now I'm faced with Boucher, Tod, Sowter 1 and Sowter 2... After the disapproving looks of my "exchangergram" (people who have seen the film 'The Internship' will understand) so called idea from my group consisting of the Sowter siblings and I, we develop the idea of an App to make people aware of Politics. Okay... as you can probably tell if you've met me this is certainly not my area of expertise. Anyway the minutes were ticking by so I went ahead and imputed myself and transformed into a political whizz.
So I see all these words that are on the page, "UKIP", "Labour", "Liberal", "Green Party". Then it hits me: in precisely 399 days I will be ticking a box to decide how our society is governed and run. I am oblivious to it all. Who are these organisations? Why am I not educated in this? It made me wonder, why are we not being educated in such things such as politics within school. Why isn't politics as a subject compulsory like Maths and English? I'm currently 16 and in the countdown of what... 399 days I will be just ticking a box with the most appealing name to it or not at all. When you think back to the suffragette movement in the late 19th and 20th century it makes you realise how much the vote means for all citizens, especially for women. They faced terrible consequences such as imprisonment, hunger striking, force-feeding and throwing themselves in front of horses as Emily Davison did at the Epsom Derby. These women did all of these drastic measures in order to have entitlement for the vote and we have no compulsory education in political matters and groups that govern our society.
Reflecting on from this challenge I have taken away that I need to go out of my own way to look into these political groups. I will do this so that I expand my knowledge that is beyond the classroom door and into real life situations.