I’ve just got back from the Social Innovation Camp where I took along the idea of ‘Personal Development Reports’. The good news is this now has a better name - ‘On The Up!’. The even better news is we have a team of people all keen to get the idea up & running. We’re going to get a blog set up in the near future so I’ll delay getting the detail of what we came up with until thats up & running and I’ll get a copy of the presentation we used in the final ‘pitch’ online too.

The final ‘pitch’ was to a panel of judges for the opportunity to win £2,000 (£1k for the runner-up). We didn’t win (or run-up) and I think its fair to say the judges were distinctly underwhelmed with our effort! Maybe this was because what we’re aiming to achieve is a bit too involved to get across in a 5 minute presentation and that people were hoping to see something that felt more finished - but it was never going to be possible for us to get to that stage in the short space of time available. The two ideas that did ‘win’ were Enabled by Design and Prison Visits (now renamed to Rate My Prison). Both ideas were technically simple and had pretty much got complete sites up & running by the end of the event. I think the Enabled by Design idea has some interesting potential especially if it helps people achieve their own design solutions.

The event was by no means a loss for us - personally I couldn’t have hoped to meet and work with a better group of people and with their input its taken a very complex concept beyond my original slightly bland thoughts and developed them into a very exciting concept (more detail on this another time!). In addition to the team we had input from all sorts of experts dropping in at various times, most of whom gave out some really useful advice and helped bring some clarity to our efforts. Perhaps what we most lacked was somebody to give some advice on how to move a concept forward to becoming a reality - the actual steps any new enterprise needs to take and the sorts of resources and people we’ll need, so this is the next step for us now and one we’ll get on with in the very near future.

For now David Wilcox who kindly joined us on Saturday has posted up a couple of films including a bit from our final pitch that you can see below: