Silver Linings Competition 2020/21
Shortlisted Finalists
WINNER
companiions TOGETHER
Lisa Robinson, Founder and CEO
Simon Peace, CFO
Rob Reng, CTO
Jon Mawer, CMO
Adam Spooner, Product Manager
Tom Braybrooke, User Experience Designer
Runner Up
Ethel - the Elderly care platform
Deepak Samson, Founder & CEO
John Compton, Co-Founder & Strategic Advisor
David Rose, CFO
Louise Finlayson, CTO
Rebecca Mulcahy, Business Development Lead
Philip Kennedy, QA and Logistics
Runner Up & audience choice winner
Smart Hydration
Andrew Stacey, Chief Executive Officer
Caroline McGill, Chief Financial Officer
Dr. Anatoli Krassavine, Chief Technology Officer
Richard Harlow, Chief Design Officer
Sean Reel, Non-Executive Chairman
Nabil Lodey, Non-Executive Director
audience choice winner
Empower your knee & move free
An affordable and wearable knee device to support and monitor the rehabilitation process for the ageing population with knee osteoarthrits
Dr Aiqin Liu, Lecturer, University of Leeds
Core technology development team :
Prof. Shane Xie : Expert in rehabilitation robotics.
Prof. Louise Jennings : Expert in knee biomechanics.
shortlisted
Future Street
We design, build & operate innovative “wellness-based with care” retirement villages for the mainstream market.
Jenny West, Founding Director
Gary West, Founding Director
Simon Greenstreet, Non-Exec Director
Dr Jane Townson, Non-Exec Director
Rob Needham, Development Director
Stuart Carr, Design Director
shortlisted
Good Life Sorted
Constantine Karampatsos, Co-Founder & CEO,
Verity Batchelder, Co-Founder & COO
Laura Barrett, Customer Experience Manager
Yulia Vykhovanets, Platform Project Manager
Viktor Bulvarenko, Full Stack Developer
£10,000 to the winning entry, and £5,000 to 2x runner-up entries
Entries were short, coherent, inspired ‘Business Plans’ that could develop into real investable solutions for pension funds and other financiers/investors to address the problem of unsustainable care for the older generations.
The competition was looking for individuals or teams employing inter-disciplinary thought processes to propose investable and implementable solutions.
We anticipated these plans to incorporate novel features and associated benefits. These plans could reach across one or multiple areas – eg: residential provision, technical innovation, financial planning, multi-generational living, home living.
The Silver Lining Finale Event
A dedicated event was held on February 10, 2022 to showcase the Business Plan shortlist and bring together inter-disciplinary professionals, companies and financial institutions to ask questions about the entries and crowd-test some of the ideas with a Dragon’s Den-style judging of the shortlist.
The goal was twofold:
- Bring together and harness the best in technology, architecture, finance, health and care provision for more (financially, socially, environmentally) sustainable and accessible care, improving quality of life and wellbeing. Encourage multidisciplinary thinking.
- Identify affordable and sustainable financial solutions that can be developed and implemented, addressing the needs of pension beneficiaries. Ideas that:
- Are long-term, affordable, reliable, trustworthy.
- Introduce ideas into pension fund financing that could best work to aid this
- Seek new financial ideas, models, structures, and more.
We were looking for new, investible, implementable and ideas in terms of how senior care might be re-thought, re-worked, joined-up and importantly financed – to have positive impact on the individuals themselves, society in general, and that can be/become more environmentally friendly, and improve longevity, quality of life and wellbeing overall.
We were agnostic on how this could be achieved
Q1: How developed does my business plan need to be and how do I submit it?
The submitted ‘business plans’ should be 3000 words max.
They need to outline the commercial opportunity but do not need fully fledged financial plans.
Business Plan submissions will be uploaded to the competition website (unless the submission author explicitly asks not to).
Q2: How will the Business Plans be judged?
The panel of judges from a variety of disciplines will assess the Business plans. They include judges from pension funds who will also be invited to input into assessment of the business plans.
NB: The judges will be aiming to select investible plans that can be taken forward by interested parties!
So, we are looking for:
- Innovative, creative thinking
- Multidisciplinary approach within and outside the finance sector
- Measurable environmental and social in/outputs (particularly related back to SDGs: see below)
- Financial sustainability
- Clear opportunity for finance sector investment in the idea (scalability)
The judges will select a shortlist of ten entries, and then 3 winners
Q3: If I am a winner/runner-up, then what happens?
The prize money goes to the idea originators listed on the submission.
We will then enable the shortlisted nominees to create a 3-5 minute video of their idea.
The videos will be housed on the Competition webpage, and then presented at the Silver Linings Digital Event.
Essential requirements
- Explain your Business Plan simply and succinctly.
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- Include a short summary of the idea at the start
- Please restrict your overall entry to a maximum of 3,000 words
- Don’t assume expert knowledge, and explain technical terms
- Please outline the financial aspects of the idea. This doesn’t need to be fully worked out but does need to address the following questions:
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- What assumptions do you need to make to make this idea viable and sustainable?
- What additional finance do you need?
- What would you offer to those providing funding or investment?
- Please explain the benefits of your idea, for example:
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- What real-world outcomes will result?
- How does it address the problems of the current system?
- Please highlight aspects of your idea which you think are particularly imaginative or innovative.
- Please include what you see as the next steps, in particular highlighting the actions needed by other stakeholders to make sure that your idea works in practice.
Desirable inputs
- Feel free to use pictures, graphs and even short videos to help bring your ideas to life.
- It would be helpful to understand the key risks to the success of your plan, and how you might improve its resilience.
- If there are similar ideas which have been tried and tested it would be useful to know about them.
- If you used any of the problem statements or brainwaves from the competition community please give them a mention.
- Tell us a bit about any team and collaborators who have helped get the idea to this point. We are particularly interested in multi-disciplinary inputs.
Additional consideration
SDGs: Additional consideration for the Competition entries will be allocated based on relevance to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
SDG 1 No poverty
- affordable for all
- finance/investment sustainable and an attractive investment for pension funds
SDG 3 Good health and well-being
- better attention to health
- better wellbeing
SDG 9 Industry, innovation and infrastructure
- innovative eg use of technology
- better use of infrastructure eg rejuvenate town centres, green new build
SDG 10 Reduced inequalities
- bringing together communities eg sharing intergenerational wisdom
- supporting equal work opportunities eg combining paid work and unpaid care for families
SDG 11 Make cities safe, inclusive sustainable, resilient
- access to safe and affordable housing and access to safe spaces in cities (eg: green)
- access to safe accessible transport systems for all