Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve spent a couple of fun days at the University of Plymouth being a dragon!

I probably need to explain …

The university’s School of Computing, Communications and Electronics is extremely keen on making its graduates more employable. This is clearly very important and is obviously a response to employers who claim that many students graduate without any business skills whatsoever.

One step that it has taken is to build into some of their IT programmes a Dragon Den’s style exercise to ensure that its students are aware of how business leaders think and what is important to them. It is a quick way for IT students to realise that business isn’t very interested in processor speeds, memory size or storage capacity; but is really excited by profit and return on investment. The students have barely been in higher education for a month, so it was probably a baptism of fire, but Plymouth’s approach is to start out the way they mean to go on.

The university managed to secure the support of a number of local business leaders to be the “dragons”. Some, such as myself, had a background in information technology, while others had a more varied background, including a representative from a private investor network of “business angels” (and hence a real dragon!)

The students were presented with a business scenario, which revolved around setting up an online booking service for local restaurants. The idea was that they had a couple of weeks to develop a business plan in teams of about 6–8 students, which they then had to pitch at us to secure £175K of seed money (which actually transpired to be a prize of 1Gb flash memory sticks for the winning participants, but, hey!)

We spent one day with them at the start of the process essentially being “nice”, providing them with consultancy advice about what they would need to consider and what would inspire us to part with £175K. We returned a couple of weeks later transformed into “dragons” ready to shred them to pieces. Each team had 30 minutes to pitch their ideas and plans; and to be grilled about their performance.

They performed very well, given their limited experience of IT, let alone business. The groups clearly had worked very hard over the intervening days and had taken the challenge seriously. It was interesting to see how the winning teams had really taken to heart the advice they had initially received and how they had transformed their raw ideas into some pretty good plans.

I’m sure the students benefitted. It is extremely important for young IT professionals to realise that technology is rarely deployed for its own sake. They may never have to pitch to potential investors, but few will escape never having had to bid for limited resources from a financial director during their careers.

From my perspective, it was also very useful to become acquainted with those who we might be employing in a few years time!

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