As part of the process of producing a viable business plan you will touch on the following stones several times during the competition:
- Research and Brainstorm
- Face the Challenges
- Ask Questions
- Get Feedback
- Identify Issues
- Review and Refine
….until you are ready to finalise your business plan and submit it for judging.
Have your team set your own fundraising goal – if so you may wish to kick start a social media campaign. You will find photographs, videos and case studies of previous competitions in your Team Toolbox folder in Basecamp – feel free to use these images during the competition.
The key factors to success include
- Wearing the moccasins of the community as deeply as possible. Imagine yourself as a villager – the daily life, limitations, struggles, joys.
- Having an inquisitive mind, not being satisfied with the first answer.
- Constantly digging deeper, looking at all of the variables.
- Checking the possible solution with fixed benchmarks, such as the environment, the taboos of the culture, the religion.
- Careful questioning, careful listening.
- Don’t assume anything. Look at all of your ideas and check none is based on a learned response.
- Learn from everyone. Ask as many people as you can for their ideas, advice, opinion. We provide a certain resource – but you are not limited to that.
- What is your instinct telling you?
- The winning team will prove the financial viability, the sustainable uplift, but the winner will likely have done all of that and come up with something that blows the judges away – a jewel of an idea that you discovered.