Oliver King, Director, Engine group
Ideaplay is based around stories. So on each Ideaplay we have a storyboard and a story around a particular couple of characters who are going through a daily routine and through reading the story the students begin to identify new opportunities for things and how these things could be solved.
Ideaplay presents a range of questions that they can use to evaluate these ideas and they boil it down and they pick one and when they’ve got the idea that they really like, they begin to mock up advertising, websites, posters, that kind of thing in order to at the end to pitch their idea.
Antonia Coppen, Research and Enterprise Office, University of Essex
One of the main benefits of playing Ideaplay for our students is actually the creation of ideas. It’s a bit of a stumbling block for students, they’re interested in entrepreneurship but they’re not quite sure how to get started. And what Ideaplay does is it actually presents to them, in a very simple way, that any scenario can create new ideas.
Mohammed Ali, Neurolingusitics, PhD student
So the idea that our group has come up with is called ‘Zap-map’ and it’s to produce maps that can be sent off through Bluetooth technology.
Antonia Coppen
Ideaplay promotes teamwork on a multitude of levels. Obviously within a university it’s multicultural, they’re studying lots of different disciplines and Ideaplay brings together working in couples, on an individual basis and then collaboratively as a team to actually progress the idea.
Mohammed Ali
We had our math person who came up with the idea and we had our finance person who was hammering us on how expensive this product is going to be, so we had to come up with a way of making it cheaper, then we had our artistic person who just kind of exploded with this emblem which says ‘yes, I’m catchy. Buy me’.
Oliver King
It brings out a whole range of presentation skills, it helps them to understand how to develop and follow some form of implementation plan.
Antonia Coppen
Ideaplay helps the student develop creativity, which isn’t necessarily something that they will gain from their individual studies.
Mohammed Ali
As a researcher you tend to focus in on one sector but with Ideaplay you have to jumble up a whole bunch of ideas and that’s good because you can connect different things at the same time and that’s what’s needed for innovative research in general to come up with new ideas.
Antonia Coppen
Entrepreneurship is a really important skill to have. Whether or not you want to be an entrepreneur in the business sense, whether you want to be a social entrepreneur or whether you’re working for someone else, certainly entrepreneurship is a skill that you can take to an employer that will set you out from the crowd and will obviously benefit that employer and Ideaplay certainly helps you develop that.