University of Oxford’s Tata Idea Idol Competition

Six shortlisted finalists will have just two minutes to impress a formidable panel of judges with their business idea in the final stages of the Tata Idea Idol competition, to be held at University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School March 7, 2012.

Created and organized by the school’s student society for entrepreneurs, known as Oxford Entrepreneurs, the first Idea Idol competition took place in 2004. The competition works to increase the awareness of entrepreneurial spirit and to increase the scope of Oxford’s entrepreneurial community.

This year, the six finalists will each give a two-minute elevator pitch to the panel of judges, including Gary Frank (CEO of The Fabulous Bakin’ Boys); Leo Johnson (Co-Founder of Sustainable Finance Ltd); Will Chadwick (Vice President of Tata Interactive Systems); and Melody Hossaini (star from The Apprentice). The end of the evening will see the winner of Tata Idea Idol 2012 awarded £7,000 in cash with additional prizes awarded at the judge’s discretion.

The 2012 finalists are:

• FoetoH
  FoetoH is a new portable technology for the care of babies before they are born. FoetoH targets fetal health and helps prevent stillbirths by providing a better quality and frequency of fetal monitoring anytime, anywhere and by anyone using smartphones, laptops and customized devices.
• BaNaPads
  Imported sanitary pads remain out of reach for most rural Ugandan families, and girls from disadvantaged backgrounds miss days of school each month once they reach puberty.  BaNaPads are affordable and hygienic sanitary pads made by converting banana pseudostems – an abundant organic waste – into highly absorbent paper using local labor and capital.
• Rehabox
  Rehabox is a personalized service to manage prescribed movement rehabilitation exercises for conditions including back pain, osteoporosis, injuries, and post-stroke to improve quality and speed of recovery. Rehabox provides reminders, instruction videos, feedback and progress monitoring using an Internet platform that links the clinic to patient’s home, artificial intelligence and low-cost sensors.
• Oxford nanoSystems
  93% of the United Kingdom’s 25M+ homes use boilers for hot water and heating predominantly using heat exchange technology that has been fundamentally unchanged for 100 years.  Oxford nanoSystems (OnS) is executing a multi-technology, multi-stage approach to bring heat exchangers into the 21st century.  Globally, over 15 million boilers are sold annually so the cumulative effect of improving this technology will materially reduce the carbon footprint of domestic households around the world.
• InVision
  InVision creates software that recognizes hidden emotions by detecting facial micro-expressions with a video camera. Micro-expressions are very short, involuntary facial expressions that reveal emotions people try to hide. They are actively used by trained officers at US airports to detect suspicious behavior. The product will have a wide global market ranging from homeland security (deception detection) to business (strategic negotiation) and entertainment (poker games).
• Medopad
  Over 20,000 surveyed NHS doctors stated in 2010 that they waste over an hour a day waiting for patient data. Medopad is a mobile health service that provides hospital doctors with real-time access to patient data. It connects to hospital servers and automatically pushes existing patient records, images and lab results, securely to the doctor’s mobile devices such as the iPad, driving down cost and saving lives.

Now in its eighth year and open to all Oxford University and Oxford Brookes students, Tata Idea Idol is a competition that aims to put budding entrepreneurs on the road to realizing their dreams. Over 250 initial entries were reduced to 40 applicants, who each submitted a detailed two-page executive summary of their business idea that were reviewed by a judging panel of entrepreneurs and business experts.

Tata Idea Idol is the flagship event of Oxford Entrepreneurs, which now has over 7,500 student members and is the largest university enterprise society in Europe.