Tina Seelig is the Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Tina is one of the most action-oriented and fun people at Stanford -- and is always doing something new and interesting. You may recall that my last post about her talked about her startup, Floodgate. One of Tina's other adventures this year was -- in her role at STVP -- being the driving force behind the the first ever Entrepreneurship Week at Stanford, where as the Stanford Daily put it:
The series of events, which drew over one thousand students, industry
professionals, and professors,
included an entrepreneur mixer, a
technology showcase, and even a venture capitalist speed dating
session. It culminated with the Saturday judging of a competition
called the Innovation Challenge. Ninety teams had to take an everyday
object — here, a pad of one hundred 3” by 3” Post-it notes — and
attempt to create as much “value” as possible. The catch? Teams only
had four days — and no funding.
The winner of the competition was "Team Gumball," which used "their Post-its to solicit donations for a
micro-lending organization called Kiva. Canvassing the campus with
their Post-it notes, they were able to raise over three-thousand
dollars.
The Post-It challenge wasn't just done at Stanford, it was done at the same time at a lot of other places in the world as well. The same contest was ran at many universities in the U.S. and throughout the world. Check out the Imagine It website. There is a promotional video (with many of my favorite people -- including Tina Seelig), and the best part is you can see the student projects and interviews. In particular, our friend Gus Bitindger who did the great innovation video for my class (which I posted about last week) has a wonderful entry he did with friends that was called whatsyourpostit.com. And as Tina says, there is one about disabled kids from Thailand that can make you cry.
Once again, the range of an depth of creativity and action that came from these student groups -- and in such a short time and with few resources -- continues to give me great hope about the future. The current generation of young people continue to impress me. Under the right conditions it seems like they can do almost anything. Thank goodness, they've got a lot of problems to fix!
The Innovation Challenge was such a remarkable experience for everyone involved that we have decided to host more of them. The next one will launch in October 2007. The results of each challenge will be captured in a series of films, called "imagine it!"
Bob, thanks for pointing everyone to the trailer for the first film.
Posted by: Tina Seelig | April 23, 2007 at 09:37 AM
I can tell from personal experience that this was a ridiculously challenging (but very fulfilling) project to work on. Our team started brainstorming ideas on a Saturday and by Tuesday, we had a website up (WhatsYourPostIt.com), a facebook group with 368 members, and 233 submitted Post-Its. We filmed the video on Wednesday and Thursday, edited it Thursday night and Friday morning, and presented it Friday at 10am on no sleep. Later that afternoon, I fell asleep on the back row in the middle of Polly LaBarre's lecture on her book, "Mavericks at Work," during Bob's Organizational Behavior class. I woke up to the entire class staring at me after Bob called me out. Thanks, Bob! =) I couldn't have made it through the week without an awesome team. Thanks to Mada Seghete, Ronald Ho, Samvit Kanoria, Rohan Khara, Min Liu, and Athena Mak for keeping me sane.
You can check out our team's video on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhv_zUXD_lw
We're really proud of it.
And you too can submit a Post-It at http://WhatsYourPostIt.com
Posted by: gus. | April 21, 2007 at 05:03 PM