So, two sets of Oxford students have shared the title of this year’s ‘Idea Idol.’ To even hold an annual competition for business innovation, with judges, a set format and patronising cash prizes, seems to be getting this whole entreprenurial thing off on the wrong foot. The real innovators will be out there scamming pensioners and dodging taxes, rather than wasting their time (and, subsequently, money) on a stuffy competition. The dearth of actual ideas is painfully plain: one of the winning entries seems based on milking a profit from the NHS by selling them an unwieldy substitute for existing hygiene, while the other winner’s business plan beggars belief: “I’m a smart guy. I know other smart guys and I’ll have a good team around me.”Based on the successful pitches, it appears the whole idea is not to identify a need and address it, but to create the false impression of a problem. It may be naive to expect budding businessmen to want to do good, but surely more naive still to assume that the world has no dilemmas left to solve. You can’t even blame the self-serving young ‘entrepreneurs’ – one was criticised by a judge thus: “You think you’ve found a solution, but really you’ve identified a problem.” That student was the only runner-up whose pitch sounded vaguely ethical, or even useful.This blissful western, capitalist belief that good can be achieved by seeking a profit has surely been debunked often enough. Trickle-down economics? Yet the gap between rich and poor still widens. Entrepreneurs doing enough social good through the job opportunities they create? Then why does Bill Gates feel the need to publicise his charitable donations and celebrity-endorsed ‘good works’? Perhaps the worst thing about this Idea Idol is its blithe indifference to this truth. One runner-up was quite happy to expect punters to pay to join a philanthropic site and run it as a profit-making venture.This competition is, in its way, a crueller thing than the rabid, red-toothed capitalism of American legend. Its very laziness, its assumption that any old idea will do if it gets a half-decent marketing job, is terrifying. Of course, the system’s already there, and Oxford students are free to try to exploit it – but could they not try a little harder? The utter lack of female finalists has been bemoaned in some quarters. Would the suggestion that this is a good thing – that it shows women have a greater degree of compunction – be too crass a gender generalisation? Or can anything be too crass, in so rapacious a context?
Editorial: Idea Idle
