By Ben Williams Year 9
After many weeks of researching and developing ideas on how to tackle water pollution and economic water scarcity, our solution was the ‘cstraw’. The ‘cstraw’ can filter any polluted and salty water, meaning that people in places like Somalia, where there is lots of economic water scarcity, can drink from dirty rivers and polluted water supplies. The ‘cstraw’ had to help at least 1 billion people worldwide, be ergonomically pleasing, affordable, durable and recyclable, in order to fit the GEMS criteria so that we could proceed to the next round.
After this, we had a conference call with Karan Deep, in Dubai and we presented our ideas and prototype to him. It went very well and a week after we were told that we had qualified for the GEMS Xcellerator challenge.
This challenge was all about making our straw into a business, with costs, partners, customers and many more areas to consider.
The beginning of the final, involved us joining online meetings, teaching us about every part of business. We were equipped with our mentor, Helen to give us tips on pitching and developing our idea further. After the meetings we had to pitch our idea to explain everything about what we will do in order to make a successful business such as all finances, manufacturing costs, target audience and many more.
After spending a week on the presentation we were ready for the final demo day where all the teams pitched their product to four judges, all very knowledgeable about business. Les presented and the rest of the team answered questions at the end.
Unfortunately we didn’t win the competition however it was a great learning experience in terms of designing, manufacturing and business. We also learned a lot about trade, copyright, sponsors and advertising.