The Swequity Exchange Final
Last Friday marked the end of five weeks of our first-ever Swequity Exchange. Eight teams delivered eight strong pitches. We can’t take credit for the high standard of delivery, but it was our goal to engineer the kinds of happy accidents that helped the Swequity finalists shine.
Inventorium director Mark Kearns opened the morning by reiterating the threefold purpose of Swequity. “We want to enable people with ideas to build a network they can call on when they have the next idea,” he said. “It’s about building capability within the community.”
The second purpose is simply to add new ideas. “If you increase the flow of ideas being considered, even being discarded, you’ll increase the flow of successful ones.”
The third goal of Swequity is to start new businesses that have the potential to be financially sustainable.
Teams pitched to a team of judges, who chose a winner from the eight finalists. Each attendee was given $5000 Swequity Dollars, to invest in the idea or ideas they liked best. The team with the most Swequity investment would win the public vote.
Each team had changed tack since we saw them at the pitch day last month, but the biggest pivot since the beginning of the challenge was with Team 4. They started work on Crowdshack, an online platform for joining and supporting projects, and found the idea wasn’t viable. They picked up team member Gianfranco Palombo’s idea, Listen to it Later and put their energy into making that an even stronger concept.
CLICK TO READ MORE The judges awarded their prize to Barry Slattery’s Linking Learning, a simple-to-use service that helps link classroom learning with home curriculum support. The public vote prize using the Swequity Dollars went to Lynne O’Donnell’s Tempity, the online temp hiring service that makes it easy to build a flexible workforce. Both Barry and Lynne will take their ideas forward, but all of the teams are pitching for NDRC’s LaunchPad, and all will get further support from Inventorium if they choose it. We’ve enjoyed watching teams inspire each other and really use their teammates, colleagues, and mentors to help them meet their own expectations. That was no accident. The point of our Swequity Exchange was not to find the next big thing. Sure, we’d love to help the team that builds the next billion-euro business. But you don’t create a community of entrepreneurs by focusing on the big gambles, and it’s not how you cultivate real innovation. You need to break a sweat. And you need to build networks. The point was the training — the burst of speed that helps you build the strength you need — not the race itself. We wanted to help our teams learn to break the right kind of sweat, to learn how to approach ideas, pivot on a dime if necessary, and learn when it’s time to walk away from a concept that just isn’t viable. We believe that the more we can help the right people meet each other, and the better we are at pushing a lean approach to validation, the better we’re doing at making ideas happen. That’s why we’re so pleased to see the kinds of links that were made, and we hope we’ve increased the chances that the next great startup idea will find the right team. If you’d like to find out more about our next Swequity, or about any of the projects or teams who participated, get in touch fiona@inventorium.org Rentable: An online network for tenants to share real information about rental properties. Founder Claire Roche’s plan to compile rental histories of houses, flats, and apartments in cities around the world appealed to anyone who has ever seen a “bijou” apartment or a “compact” flat, or dealt with an absentee landlord. FabLab: A personal fabrication service. FabLab Dublin will offer precision milling, 3D printing, and laser cutting, which will help businesses and individuals make prototypes, replacement parts, and small runs of products. They’ll also offer consultancy, training, and membership for people who want to use FabLab to make their wild digital ideas into real things. Stamply: A loyalty card system for your smartphone, which allows you to collect reward points for multiple small- to medium-sized businesses. Merchants don’t need extra hardware, and all customers need to do is download the app. Stamply even lets users know when it’s time to cash in their points for rewards. Linking Learning: This online service makes it easy for primary school teachers to share information about topics and learning outcomes, and provides tips and feedback that helps parents reinforce classroom learning at home. Barry Slattery’s concept was focused not just on being useful, but on creating something that is incredibly easy for teachers and parents to use. Distillr: This is a management system for cleaning, hosting, and processing open data. This doesn’t sound so sexy, but, as founder Brian Daly noted, 42% of apps use open data, and that data is stored in all kinds of formats, and in all kinds of places. Distillr makes it easy for developers to standardise and clean datasets, so they can focus on building solid apps with a great user experience. Gotcha Ninjas: A social game that allows students to rack up points for achievements and good behaviour, and exchange them for rewards. It reduces the amount of time teachers spend dealing with classroom discipline. Educator and founder Tony Riley tried an offline version of this and saw a significant drop in absences. Tempity: An online temp service that takes the stress out of hiring a temp, and makes life easier for temps. It offers skill-matching, a rating system, and availability tracking. Temps sign up and confirm availability on days they can work, so that companies only see the names and details of temps who are actually available. It’s also cheaper for companies to use, and lets temps get a higher hourly rate than with conventional agencies. Listen to it Later: This music aggregator and bookmarking tool allows users to collate and share music from different online streaming services into a single playlist. Listen to it Later is already up and running in 30 countries, with a few hundred users. They see themselves as a kind of Instapaper or Readitlater for music.Life after Swequity
The eight finalists
Posted on August 8th, 2012 by fiona