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| Franck presents one of the pitches. |
In a business development course, I am responsible for, the final presentation and examination consists of a final pitch that is similar to the famous Dragons’ den series in which entrepreneurs get three minutes to pitch their business ideas to five multimillionaires willing to invest their own cash. In our version students pitch their idea to various players in business development and innovation in the region.
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The IDEA developers is a course that supports students who are interested in developing an idea or identified need and dare to go into entrepreneurship.
The course ranges from having a feeling for a problem area where the student is supported in finding opportunities for entirely new ideas and products to a relatively well-formulated and defined product idea where the student is encouraged in formulating their business plan.
The course uses different methods and tools to prototype and verify both the business plan and the product.
The course is conducted as a collaboration between Production Innovation at LTU and LTU Business. |
In this pitch, students typically bring physical prototypes or show interactive presentations on how their products are intended to work, how they have verified that customers are willing to pay for their product and that the business plan is sane. To complement the pitch, the student also designs a small brochure as well as a written business plan.
During the final rehearsal, we realized that the impact of the limitations of video meetings (audio glitches, problems sharing documents, presenting prototypes and switch seamlessly between speakers) was very high in a pitch like this. So much that we felt that we lost the feeling of presence and excitement – the vibe, that is present in a regular pitch just disappears.
So in discussion with the students, we decided that they would instead produce a “Kickstarter” video, i.e. a video pitch that they could prepare at home, and here they could easily integrate product demonstrations and switch between speakers.
In the session today we hosted a zoom session with students and people from LTU Business and Arctic Business Incubator (everyone was sitting in their homes) where we presented ourself and then shared the video through Zoom (don’t forget to click the “Optimize Screen Share for Video clip “ and “Share computer sound”).
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| Options you need when you share a video clip in Zoom |
As a backup, we also had the video as a private youtube link in the chat, but everyone in the session was satisfied with the quality from the video.
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| One of the teams was distributed around Sweden due to cancellations of flights. |
After the presentation, there was an open floor where the experienced business developers from LTU Business and Arctic Business Incubator ask questions to the students.
Reflections
I think that the presentation was a success, the videos that the students had prepared was very professional, and even though there is something special to do a co-located pitch I think that the idea of creating a video pitch is something I may bring into the course next year even if run the course on campus.
In one of the presentation, due to cancelled flights, the team was located in Luleå, in Arlanda and one on a train between Malmö and Stockholm. And in this case, a normal zoom presentation would have been a disaster. But following the presentation video and answering questions worked well.
