Two weeks ago, I and the rest of Sutton Young Enterprise’ Team Concept was invited to Portcullis House, Westminster, for the annual Silicon Valley Comes to Parliament Event.
It was a fantastic opportunity to communicate with, and listen to, some of the most experienced, inspiring and enthusiastic entrepreneurs of our generation. The day started with a speech from Chuka Umunna, Shadow Business Secretary, and John Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons. They extolled the virtues of enterprise education and encouraged us all to pursue our business ambitions fully.
We then heard from an eclectic mix of inventors and business people from across the world, most notably: Mary Lou Jepsen, founder and CEO of Pixel Qi and Co-Founder of One Laptop per Child; Angela Lin, head of YouTube Education; and Ramesh Raskar, Associate Professor at MIT Media Lab.
Mary spoke to us about her One Laptop per Child project. She had designed and manufactured a robust, low-cost laptop (priced at just £60) for distribution in impoverished countries, as part of an admirable endeavour to make high quality education affordable, and use it as a means of overcoming poverty.
Angela discussed the benefits and prospects of the advent of "Youtube Education." She cited a heart-warming example of a Pakistani girl who was unable to complete a course she had enrolled in due to a lack of material, but managed to surmount this issue with the help of online educational resources provided by Udacity and educational forums.
Ramesh showed off his work in ground-breaking computational photography. He had developed a revolutionary camera technology with the capacity to look round corners, operating at a trillion frames per second! His TED lecture is available here: http://www.ted.com/talks/ramesh_raskar_a_camera_that_takes_one_trillion_frames_per_second.html
Three Young Enterprise teams from last year were then asked to deliver a short presentation on the merits of Young Enterprise and what they had been doing over the course of their journey. St Paul's recounted their experience, from brainstorming to fundraising to finally manufacturing and selling their "chewable" flavoured pencils. Alleyne's High School spoke about their organisational app, aimed at schoolchildren to help them keep track of events and deadlines. We, from Sutton, discussed the problems we encountered and the solutions we conceived when creating our product, the Cable Stable - a small device designed to deal with messy wires and troublesome tangles.
After the event had concluded we were all invited on a tour of parliament, which proved an enjoyable end to an inspiring and successful day.
