Could you capture a business idea on the back of a beermat? The Beermat Challenge set by Research and Enterprise Development (RED) has been challenging students to do just that for the last six weeks.

Using beermats and a parallel website, almost 260 business ideas were captured. Visitors to the site voted for the ideas they liked and disliked and overall the website attracted over 23,000 votes. Participants were able to send their friends links and Facebook prompts to their idea to encourage them to vote for it and to submit their own ideas.

The six weeks were broken into three two-week rounds and the most popular idea in each round won a prize. The winning students were:

• Round One: Oliver Brown (3rd year Chemistry) with a Tripadvisor-style rating system for student properties and landlords
• Round Two: Mosalam Ebrahimi (PhD student in Computer Science) who proposed redistributing an end-of-year collection of household items discarded by departing students to new students
• Round Three: Howard Chu (2nd year Medicine) who suggested fitting gym running machines with dynamos to generate power for the gym

Dave Jarman, RED’s Enterprise Skills and Education Manager explained:

‘We wanted a really dynamic start to the 2011 competition. The beermats have been very popular and we’ve got a lot of people thinking of business ideas now. We hope they will develop them and win the £35,000 prize money next year. The best business ideas can often be summarised very quickly and tend to emerge when people get together – beermats are often where business ideas are first written down.’

Over the next three months RED are providing a range of advice workshops for students and staff entering the main New Enterprise Competition round.