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etch of the Imagination

h a tight deadline, students make the most of an innovation contest.

By Richard L. Brandt

As Stanford Entrepreneurship Week opens, several hundred students areanticipating the moment that Tina Seelig, onstage at Memorial Auditorium, giv

up the secret they've been waiting to hear. The executive director of theStanford Technology Ventures Program is simultaneously whipping up theaudience's enthusiasm, making housekeeping announcements and withholdinguntil the last minute one essential detail. She's here to evangelize the 2008Innovation Challenge, wherein teams will get 5!days to make as much value possible out of a mundane object.

Last year's first international Innovation Challenge was conducted with Post-itand on this Friday afternoon in February the crowd watches the premiere of adocumentary, Imagine It!,about some of the ways the 2007 participantsdeployed the colorful sticky notes. Post-its were used to collect money formicrolending or charities, to conduct a pay-it-forward campaign of random

compliments, to design disposable Braille signage, and to compose music madof measures gathered one per contributor.

Some in this audience already have forged teams: engineering, design andbusiness profs have been quick to encourage participation. Registered teams wcomplete their entries by uploading three-minute videos to YouTube by 9 a.m.Thursday. Eclectic prizes have been lined upone lucky team will get to play

hball with viral marketing guru Tim Draper, another will hear Al Gore speak at a Deloitte world meetingbut ining with the freewheeling nature of the contest, the prize categories will be decided after the entries come in.

des, the true reward might not be a prize, but a win to put on one's rsum orimagine it!a marketable idea.

g, PhD '85, finishes thanking sponsors and inviting people to eWeek events such as the creativity workshop or

ure capitalist speed-dating. Finally comes the big reveal. What will the instant entrepreneurs spend their next 135s contemplating? Rubber bands.

e gray Tuesday afternoon, seven of the 13 members of Rubberband Together are at Old Union tapping at theirops or brainstorming on the whiteboard or delivering, like Vivian Yea-Shih Wang, '09, some discouraging words:me Depot didn't have rubber bands. They said they could only donate, like, plywood or something.

n you want to lobby for breast-cancer research, plywood might be one of the few items to seem even less relevanrubber bands. Rubberband Together has devised an awareness campaign and is creating a website linked to Susan

omen for the Cure. For every signature the team collects on the site, it will add a rubber band to a rubber banddocumenting its growth.

bers have sent e-mails to friends and family, made posters for dining halls, posted information on Facebook sites,notices to newspapers and radio stations, spent time buttonholing people. I've been sleeping five or six hours at; otherwise I'm working on this pretty much full time, says Richard Lo, '11.

one night doctoral candidate Mickey Pentecost had to bolt from a Farm Band Aid meeting because he had cellsg in the lab. This team recognized that fresh produce often comes bundled in a rubber band. Partnering with Farmand Whole Foods, they have conjectured that the grocery-store PLU (product look up) code could be printed on ths of food grown locally; consumers then could go online and learn more about the farms next door. The team pollpers who said they'd happily pay a nickel or dime more for their asparagus if they could support a local grower. Nofrom Farm Band Aid slept Wednesday night when the video was being made, but the team would win thepetition's Green Prize.

m Do Band won the Biggest Impact prize by starting with the recognition that Everybody has their own cause. Th

May/June 2008

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m stamped rubber bands with a web address and a serial number, then gave them out. Each individual who took a had to pledge to meet some precise personal goal, to record its completion online, and then pass the band on. T

o starred rubber band #47. Do Bands inspired a variety of small missions accomplished, including tons of phoneto mothers and more than $500 donated to charities of Do Band wearers' choosing.

epreneurs emphasize that the course of true innovation ne'er runs smooth. The Academic Technology Lab at Meyerary could hardly loan its 12 mini DV camcorders fast enough to those among the 50 competing teams who didn't finpment elsewhere. The Stanford Secret Sharing team devised a participatory art project wherein passersby coulde down a secret and then hang it on a web of rubber bands set up on wooden poles planted in the grass at Whitea. The team set up its web Sunday night, only to find the following morning that maintenance crews had dismantlehe team built it againand took home the tournament's Freud Prize.

project's popularity overwhelmed a similar idea called the Stanford Rubber Wishing Tree. That team, taking note much more popular it proved to post secrets than wishes, made its video a testament to the entrepreneurial maxearly, fail fast. The judges awarded that entry its Biggest Failure Prize, a day with Highland Capital Partners.

is article was modified from the print version of the magazine.

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