Corporate Social Responsibility
In March 2010, after Creative Pod Director Matt Turner won Young Entrepreneur of the Year he took it upon himself to find the Gatwick Diamonds next Young Entrepreneur. Young Start up Talent was born - a competition aimed at 16-21 year olds who live, work or study in the Gatwick Diamond.
The brief was to come up with a business idea that you wanted to launch into the real word. Matt secured a prize fund worth £50,000 which was donated from local leading businesses in the Gatwick Diamond. Matt and his sponsors ran workshops and assemblies in over 20 schools and colleges within the Gatwick Diamond trying to drum up applicants as well as inspire young people. We also received over 80 press articles even making the front cover of the Weekend Herald.
With over 40 applications received Matt and his team whittled them down to 10 semi finalists and hosted an informal networking meeting with the semi finalist and 15 sponsors. These were then short listed to the final 5.
Young Start Up Talent, Dragons Den Final from Laura Jackson on Vimeo.
On the 16th of December we hosted a "Dragons Den" style judging evening at the offices of Thales UK in one of their high security rooms. Each finalist had to present their business idea for 3 minutes and then have a 10 minute Q&A from a panel of 6 judges. One of the Judges being Marion Brought, the President of Thales Training and Simulation UK. The whole evening was filmed by a production company who are making the footage into a BBC style mini dragons den episode which will be aired at the grand unveiling of the winner on the 20th of January where over 300 leading business people, public sector, third sector and education leaders will meet for the glitzy unveiling.
Henry Smith MP has also agreed to provide the voice over for the video. We are delighted that Olympic Gold Medallist Winner Amy Williams agreed to be an ambassador for
the project.
This project has been pitched to over 4,000 local school/college students and has received over 500 inches of news paper columns. It has also ticked the CSR box with over 30 local companies and Thales have requested that they can play the dragons den video at their next board meeting in Paris.
On the 22nd July 2011 we launched Young Start-up Talent II which is now open for entries For more information please visit www.youngstartuptalent.co.uk