Member Article

Big Wide Ears win Big Ideas

A potentially revolutionary twist on satellite navigation came out on top at a young people’s enterprise competition this week.

Team Big Wide Ears, from St. Aidan’s School, Sunderland won the Big Ideas ICT Youth Challenge Competition, held at Otterburn Hall in Northumberland.

Nathan Mersh (15), Big Wide Ears team member, said: “It’s extremely rewarding to be announced as the winners, as we’ve been working with the other teams for so long and we know how strong their ideas were. The judges must have thought that ours is something really special!”

Paul McEldon, Chief Executive of the North East Business and Innovation Centre (BIC), who was part of the jury, said: “As the overall winners, Big Wide Ears have demonstrated exceptional business acumen and entrepreneurial flair at such an early age. The nature of the device that they have developed also shows that they have sound understanding of new and developing technologies.”

The six teams that made it to the final spent a week at Otterburn Hall. They went canoeing and raft-building while developing the final presentation of their ideas with the assistance of a variety of business experts including Colin Hewitt, Partner at Ward Hadaway, Jason Ollivent, North of England Business Manager for Microsoft UK, and Stephen Green, Head of Communications at the Entrepreneurs’ Forum.

Stephen Green said: “What impressed me most was that these young people are coming up with ideas that have real commercial potential. Through our ‘If we can, you can’ campaign, the Entrepreneurs’ Forum aims to create a bridge between enterprise education and the reality of building scalable, sustainable businesses by encouraging connections with those who have ‘been there and done it’. It’s crucial that we harness the potential of these young people and nurture a new generation of emerging entrepreneurs - as the bedrock of the region’s economic future.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .