entrepreneurship is all about leveraging resources and taking action with the goal of creating value. your challenge is to use an assigned, everyday object to create as much "value" as possible. students from around the world are invited to participate. the global innovation tournament falls under the auspices of the global entrepreneurship week.

competition: 2008 global innovation tournament
submission:  my darling ethyl,
recognition: ingenuity award; audience award

david goligorsky and i decided to give this a shot. this year's every day object: the water bottle! the tournament lasted four days, at the end of which each team was required to submit a short (under 3 minutes) youtube video in which they featured their new, value-laden bottles. something like 500 teams from around the world signed up and about 200 submitted videos.

david and i spent considerable time fleshing out the characteristics of the water bottle-- e.g. the neck, the cap, the label, the threaded feature-- and used this perspective to better understand and then tweak the frame from which we viewed the challenge. we imagined several unusual propositions for the bottle: the bottle as a weight, the bottle as building material, the bottle as a container, the bottle as a musical instrument, the bottle as buoyancy, the bottle as an educational tool, the bottle as a utilitarian object. we quickly narrowed our focus to the threaded cap.

we basically treated the bottle cap as a linear actuator wherein human-derived torque translates into linear displacement. this led us to consider applications that require small amounts of leveling-- such as uneven tables. to make the idea sticky, we took the absurd, slapstick route, creating a silent movie choreographed to scott joplin's "cascades."

to our delight, david and i received two awards for our video: the ingenuity prize and the audience prize! our trophy took the form of four box seats to a san jose shark's game and a game of ice hockey with guy kawasaki, respectively (who knew so much ice hockey would accompany my move to california?).