Last week, our team, the Intuition Coalition (Caroline Hu, Priscilla Wang, Michelle Guan, and Jennie Xu) participated in Intuit IdeaJam!
Intuit is a software company that focuses on financial and tax preparation software for small businesses. To encourage students to take initiative and come up with new ideas, Intuit hosted a competition called IdeaJam on the Claremont Colleges campus. The idea is simple: each team consisting of a maximum of 4 students work together over a time span of 2 weeks to come up with a way to solve for a unique business problem. The prompt varies year to year. This year, the prompt was related to small businesses and network effects. While we did not know what to expect at the competition since none of our team members had participated before, we were excited to represent Scripps as women interested in business and technology.
The Intuition Coalition had a great and fun time putting together a solution for Intuit. We presented our product at IdeaJam with enthusiasm and confidence because we truly believed in our solution.
Some of the tips that we would give to future participants:
- Ask questions: Intuit will require you to go around the area and interview small businesses.
- Be confident: In order to convince the judge that your idea is the best, you will have to convince yourself first.
- Be creative: Think about your business problem from various angles and perspectives.
- Be open to new ideas: If something is not working, do not be afraid to improve upon your idea or even start over again.
- Do your research: Look at what the company and its competitors are doing. What is working and what isn’t? What do consumers think?
- Go all out: Be committed and determined and, as cheesy as it sounds, you will learn and be a winner regardless of the actual outcome!
We hope our experience will encourage you to take part in future business and tech competitions. It was a great learning and team bonding experience. We look forward to seeing you at IdeaJam next year!
– Priscilla Wang and Caroline Hu
