Month: March 2017

Last week, on Tuesday 7^th March my team was at the University Business Challenge (UBC) 2016/17 semi-final round in Sheffield, one of four semi-final rounds.

The day was split between four activities, each giving points depending on how well each team did. The four activities were:

• Start up
• Planning
• Running
• Scaling up/continuity

Start Up

A creative activity, each team had to come up with up to three product ideas incorporating a hen theme. A fun starting activity, the team came up some interesting ideas including:

• Egg on the go: An app allowing people to locate and buy eggs from local producers.
• Chickflick: A subscription service for chick flicks films.
• Hen Bomb: A novelty item that causes chicken feathers to go flying everywhere.

The creative juices were flowing all around, and it was a pleasure when our ideas were mentioned among the top five groups that the judges liked.

Planning

The planning activity introduced two new concepts that I had not come across before: the problem matrix and the business model canvas, both of which I’ll expand on in a future post.

The activity itself covered putting together a business model canvas for the social enterprise Social Bite. The canvas itself is an interesting concept and one I’ll look to apply in the future.

Running

Starting after the planning activity, the third activity was a simulation split into three parts throughout the middle of the day to allow for the results of each period to be calculated.

This activity was probably the most intense for me on the day, where we had days to come to a decision in the first round of the UBC here we had minutes. While we had an hour to make our decisions for the first period, this included having little prior information expect for basic financial information (rent, utility bills, and cost of materials/labour) and marketing information. Additionally, we also had to decide on the type of location (small, medium and large) to run the business from, which would affect our initial starting capital. The second and third periods we had 20 minutes to analyse the previous period’s results and make our new decisions.

Scaling Up/Continuity

Imaging that we’d been running a business for at least two years we had to put together a 60 second elevator pitch. Of the 40 minutes given for this task we spent more than half coming up with an idea and managed to crack together the who, why, and finances in record time. We were also fortunate that one of our team members is great at presentations and was able to pull it off without a sweat.

Networking

While not one of the core activities of the day, the last before the results given, we were ‘encouraged’ to speak to members of different teams and lecturers. I do feel however, while understanding why this was at the end in order to put together the final scores, that this was not the best time to encourage networking on the basis that at the end of the day the majority of attendees to me seemed, to one extent or another, worn out from the day.  Which for me at least isn’t the best of states to be in when networking!

End Thoughts

Overall I enjoyed the experience, with the team placing 5^th out of 30. While this did not guaranteed us a place in the finals we have entered into a pot with the remainder 8 runner up teams from the four semi-final rounds, with one team being randomly picked to go through. With luck we’ll be picked and going through to the final, but if not I would like to end this post with two sentiments.

The first: To the team, thank you for a truly enjoyable experience. It has been a pleasure and while as a team we may not compete together again next year, it would be an honour to compete together in other competitons.

The second: To anyone reading this and thinking of entering two words, do it. You will not regret it, and will learn a lot, not only about business but also about yourself.

Best Part of the Day: The best part of the day was the team work, with the pressure of limited time to complete the activities

Worst Part of the Day: The pressure to complete the activities within short time periods.

I had intended for this post to go out last month, but due to issues first with the server and then the website deciding that it didn’t want any updates from December onwards to appear anymore, got caught up resolving these issues. This took longer than expected to resolve, but all good now (hopefully). This also meant that I rewrote this post several times, each time expecting to upload… oh well.

February was a busy month, between getting back into university there was an itinerancy with only a days’ notice (that was a busy few days getting things organised), writing my application for the Internship Programme at the Lord Ashcroft International Business School and sorting out groups for this semesters group assignments (two this semester, one presentation and a time based group written assignment).

Last week I had my interview for the Internship Programme and found out Wednesday that I had been accepted.

Moving forward there’s the second round of the UBC next week in Sheffield, my team is looking forward to the challenge and facing off against the other teams.

With assignments building up March is looking to be another busy month, and at this rate I’m not daring to think of April, let alone May when exams are taking place.

Speaking of assignments, one that I am looking forward to this Semester is Business Research Methods. The module itself is an introduction, as titled, to business research methods.

The aims of the module are to:

• Cover a range of qualitative and quantitative research methods, and how to analyse qualitative and quantitative data.
• Provide a guide to understanding the processes where students are introduced into the field of business and management research.
• Instruct how to construct research questions and objectives, and how to write a research proposal.

As someone who likes to research various topics for fun that this module aims to help improve my skills is something I’m excited about. Particularly as the topics I’m interested in are becoming more in-depth. Where previously I was happy to read about others research I now want to conduct my own. Of course, let’s see how I’ll feel about this come the end of the semester!