Profiting from the windy Pampas

Business | Environment - Pete Wilton | 04 Aug 10. Last month young scientists and engineers from Oxford and Cambridge joined together in teams to learn how to pitch business ideas to a Dragon's Den-style panel of judges. The theme of the event - Oxbridge Connects - was renewable energy and the winner of the £1200 first prize was an Oxbridge team with an idea for setting up wind farms in rural Argentina. I caught up with two members of the winning team, Claudio Silvestrin of Oxford University's Department of Physics and Vihar Georgiev of Oxford's Department of Chemistry, to ask them how they pitched a winner: OxSciBlog: Why did you focus on wind power in Argentina? - Claudio Silvestrin: One of our team members, Julian Tuccillo, who became the project leader later on, is Argentine and he proposed a wind project for rural areas in his home country. He had a lot of background information on it and we all liked the idea of working on a project with an international context. Looking back, it was a very good decision. In the process of developing our ideas we learned a lot about the challenges you face when setting up a business in an area like rural Argentina. For example, in a project set in the UK you most likely wouldn't need to think about people still living without electricity and how life-changing the installation of a small wind turbine might be for them. Vihar Georgiev: Another reason was the fact that the project was supposed to be on a small scale and this particular topic made it realistic for us as students. The final reason behind choosing this topic was that it didn't touch upon the UK market, as we expected other teams to concentrate on this. OSB: What did you learn about developing/presenting business ideas?