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Ellie, Jasmine and I embarked our day on the tube heading to Imperial College. The week’s preparation for the event gave us an even bigger scope of knowledge and awareness of the issue, so our minds were filled with ideas to tackle common consumer habits of single-use plastics. By researching and reading around different websites, it inspired us to drive with ambition for a long-lasting solution.
We arrived and were swiftly taken to the pitch room to practice our keynote speeches. After running through them with Dhruv, we headed upstairs to take our seats. It was a great opportunity to use our written speeches as guidance but truly speak from our point of view on our focused topic. My focused topic was Grab and Go food and I urged in my speech how as consumers we had become so mindless to single-use plastics because we based our consumption on convenience. |
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This made me ambitious to try to seamlessly alter this attitude, without taking away from the customers need for a quick and easy bite to eat.
The keynotes drew to a close and we were given insightful speeches from Chris Herwin from reboot innovation and Selly Beken, head UK Circular Plastics Network Manager, helping us think about how we can get products and solutions onto the market We then separated off into our focus groups, my focus was Grab and Go food, a difficult problem since again we had to think about not affecting the convenience of Grab and Go food. Throughout the day I learnt ways in which to conduct a productive meeting, we initially started with a mind board with different targets of our solution, for example our market. By establishing our market as busy office workers who require a speedy lunch it allowed us to model our product around our aims. |
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Over lunch I was able to gain an insight to the work of the Design graduates at Imperial College, it was really interesting to see how they combine utility and an educational aspect in their designs.
After coming up with this product, we then had a talk from Leila Sheldrick, HD of Global Innovation Design Imperial College London about the existing designs of our focus groups. It was fascinating to see the gap in the market the producers found and how these solutions could be used in our everyday life. Then to enable us to present our idea effectively Jake Higgens, from Venture Partners gave a talk on how to give a pitch. Allowing us an hour to compose a pitch containing our strategy, the problem, the solutions and the financials. A slightly manic hour of composing our pitch and presentation entailed, but it forced us to hone in on our ideas. We finally finessed it and headed downstairs to the pitching room to address everyone. While the judges had 10 minutes to judge all our pitches, we were able to chat in the foyer and once again I was able to speak to people from a range of careers that were all at the Hackathon for their shared passion in Sustainability. The awards were given, I was over the moon for my team to win runners up. After the awards presentation came to a close, my group all exchanged emails and at the moment we are all still strategizing to see how we can take Tupper-club into the up and coming market of re-useable packaging, of which is aiming at a more sustainable way of life. Phoebe |
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