Project 6 Brief

Introduction

This project invites you to engage directly with the marketplace, bypassing or seducing its gatekeepers, to achieve a profitable intervention in the creative economy.

Brief

Despite the smell of fear induced by recession and fears of recession, we live in a culture with an appetite for novelty. This project invites your team to conceive, create, promote and sell a completely new product or service. There are no restrictions on the nature of the offer itself, beyond the need to adhere to the law of the land (nothing, for example, dangerous, fraudulent, or copyright infringing). Your product may be something tangible, it may be a service or event, or a virtual product. But whatever your product is, it must represent both innovation and application skills that allow it to connect with a commercial framework.

*As well as naming and branding your own group’s product or service, you should collectively decide on a name for this project, and use that name to brand the exhibition in which your outcomes are shown.

Presentation

All teams will be required to develop their products into physical or virtual artefacts. Your journey to the market place will be captured and criticized in a reflective journal (to be produced by each member of the team). The resulting artefacts, profit and loss balance sheet and supporting research will be presented at an exhibition to be held in the MADS studio during the week of 20 April. Feedback from tutors and peers will be delivered on the afternoon of Monday 20 April and the evening of Wednesday 22 April. The private view will take place on the evening of Monday 20 April.

This project will require a sophisticated team management strategy. Your tasks will, at the very least, include market research, pitching, negotiating, PR, print and web design, accounting, catering, building and breakdown of the exhibition.

Any profits generated by the teams during this project will become part of the funds available for the MADS Degree Show in December 2009.

Criteria

The project will be assessed against the following criteria:

* Your ability to identify a specific opportunity and to develop an original product to fill this gap in the market

* Your ability to manage, delegate, share, take responsibility, plan and deliver the product to the marketplace

* The level of risk taking you display

* Your ability to move beyond the predictable

* Your ability to manage the gatekeepers

* Your ability to work constructively as a group

* The quality and originality of your solution, and the degree to which you give it dimension as an iterated artefact

* Your ability to sell yourselves and the radical potential of your concept to others in the supply chain and retail sector who are potentially less attracted to risk

* The communicative qualities of your artefact and your exhibition

* Your ability to generate revenue while still taking imaginative risks