Barclays asks young people to pitch for slice of £100k

Barclays asks young people to pitch for slice of £100k

Barclays has teamed up with TV station Channel 4 to launch an online competition that will see young Brits pitch business and community ideas for a slice of £100,000 in funding.

The Stake lets anyone aged between 16 and 21 submit ideas about how they would spend a share of the money, "be it a start up business, a new school skate ramp, one-off event - or anything in between".

To enter, participants have to log in through Facebook and then add their idea to the Web site. They are presented with three tabs for providing general information, budget details and a promotional video.

Each tab is accompanied by a short Youtube video providing advice from people such as Lastminute.com co-founder Martha Lane Fox, Apprentice winner Tim Campbell and Barclays' own CEO of retail and business banking, Antony Jenkins.

Ideas are then backed by stakeholders who obtain their stakes by completing a raft of challenges on the site based on the Barclays Money Skills programme and designed to build financial knowledge and abilities.

Among the ideas already pitched include a seat belt attachment for pregnant women, a cookery school and "bottom enhancement underwear".

The 20 ideas that receive the most stakeholder support by the end of 23 December will then be judged by a panel from Channel 4 Education and Barclays. Up to six winners will be announced in January and each will be given up to £20,000, along with support from financial experts, to make their ideas a reality, with a film crew following their progress.

Says Jenkins: "Barclays is excited to be supporting The Stake which is a great way for young people to turn their ideas into reality. This innovative competition will identify some of the business leaders of tomorrow and provide many more young people with valuable financial knowledge."

Comments: (1)

Ketharaman Swaminathan
Ketharaman Swaminathan - GTM360 Marketing Solutions - Pune 15 November, 2011, 17:50Be the first to give this comment the thumbs up 0 likes

Kudos to Barclays for using innovative Web 2.0 and social media technologies to foster community innovation. Unfortunately, as thestake admits, the number of stakeholders is not displaying correctly. Hope the organizers fix this problem ASAP for it has a strong influence on the level of engagement this competition can spur. 

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