Bright ideas

Hopefully you managed to squeeze in some time over mid-term break to tap into your inner-entrepreneur and come up with a ground-breaking business idea for the Student Enterprise Awards.

However, if you're still staring at a blank sheet of paper waiting for that eureka moment, or if the best suggestion to emerge from your group's brainstorming session was the old reliable of weeding gardens, don't despair.

There is still time to come up with an original, innovative and exciting idea that could also turn out to be a nice little money-spinner. And if you're in desperate need of inspiration, we've gathered some pearls of wisdom on how to get over the first hurdle of becoming an entrepreneur - deciding what to do.

"Do something you like doing. If you enjoy it, it's going to be easier to sell," advises Michelle Hannon, who manages the Terenure Enterprise Centre in Dublin.

Some young entrepreneurs end up hating their project, Hannon says, because they get roped into doing something that doesn't interest them.

Play to your strengths. If, for example, you and your friends are experts on make-up, think about what kind of cosmetics-related venture you might be able to run together.

Stick to something within your realm of experience, or at least research the work involved to see if you actually enjoy it.

The number one business idea that comes through the doors of the Terenure Enterprise Centre is to open a coffee shop, Michelle says. However, most of these aspiring baristas have never even stood behind a shop counter before, let alone worked in a coffee house, and they discover that running a shop is far more time-consuming and pressurised than they had realised.

"Look around you," Michelle advises. "Look at your neighbours. What is it that they need?"

Scanning the small ads of local papers is a good way of getting a feel for the needs of people in your area. Also, watch out for changes in the law, Government policy or the economy which could present business opportunities - for example in areas such as road safety or renewable energy. Keep an eye on the news for problems that you might be able to solve.

"Businesses that are successful have an edge," Michelle adds. "Nobody talks about sameness, they talk about the difference."

Ideas don't have to come in a sudden flash of divine inspiration. Some of the best ideas develop and grow out of a project in which the person is already involved. Take the composer Denis Roche for example. He was commissioned to write a piece of music for hospital patients and started wondering whether it would be possible to take the idea a little further by incorporating interactive media in some way.

Denis now runs OpenWindow (www.openwindow.ie), which provides patients with a virtual window that enables them to stay in contact with their family and friends and the outside world while they're in long-care treatment. Video messages, photographs of loved ones, and nature scenes are projected onto a wall of the patient's room.

The system is installed in St James's Hospital and the feedback from patients has been extremely positive. Roche plans to roll out OpenWindow further over the next few years, and centres as far afield as Australia have expressed an interest.

Pioneering a unique idea such as this can be daunting and requires huge confidence in your product. The reason that no one else has done it before could simply be that there is no demand for it.

"Slowly but surely similar ideas have come into the market, so that has made me think that I'm not crazy!" Roche says. "Really believing in the potential of the idea has been a big driver for me."

Finally, don't imagine that just because you're still in school you can't come up with a lucrative business idea. Last year's Shell Livewire Young Entrepreneur of the Year winner John Beckett earned himself a cool €20,000 when he was just 16 by designing Ryanair's website.

Having set up a successful web design venture Adrenalin Systems while still in school, John decided to continue along the entrepreneurial path (and has since founded several more businesses such as biometrics solutions company ByamSys) rather than going down the more conventional route of third-level education.

"From my own experience, when I was leaving school, everyone was saying if you don't do a good Leaving Cert, your life is going to be over, you're going to mess up your whole career," he recalls.

"That's not true at all. Just because you don't get to do BESS in Trinity doesn't really affect whether you're going to be a success in business or not."