THE 2007 Northern Caribbean University (NCU) Imagine Cup team is moving to market their award-winning IT software - Computer Aided Distance Instruction (CADI).

Fresh from a recent visit to a business training camp in Silicon Valley, California, the team is confident that with proper research and careful planning, they can successfully bring CADI to market. After all, its the product that saw them winning the third place prize in the Microsoft-sponsored Imagine Cup competition last year.

Imagine Cup Team at a Microsoft presentation in 2007. They are (from left) Damion Mitchell, Imran Allie, Ayson Baxter, Kenrie Hylton and Conroy Smith.

"It was a great experience because we met with very knowledgeable professionals from mostly business and entrepreneurial-focussed organisations, such as the Silicon Valley Association of Start-up Entrepreneurs (SVASE) and British Telecom (BT), who are part of the competition's innovation accelerator programme," said team member Ayson Baxter in a release to Career & Education. "They helped us understand how we can rapidly turn our invention into a product; so the trip was very successful."

The team noted that each day of camp saw them running through business pitch exercises and marketing skills; and culminated with an actual pitch to a potential investor.

"The final pitches of the day were to actual companies who may invest in our product, one day we pitched to the guy who started Hi5, Ramu Yalamanchi, and so each day was very intense and difficult," said Imran Allie.

In addition to trying to snag a potential investor for CADI, the team also used the trip to conduct research for their product, focussing on finding their target market, the cost of delivering the software to the wider market, and calculating an appropriate price for the product.

"It is important that we take this thing step by step because we wouldn't want to make any major mistakes in marketing our product so research is a very important part of putting our product out there," noted Conroy Smith.

They said that CADI is ready for the market, but noted that most investors prefer to see a product already in operation before spending large sums of money on it..

"Our product is at a place where investors could come in and spend money on it. But large investors like to see something that is already working, so we'll have to work on that," said Baxter.The team will be travelling to Doha, Qatar at the end of this month for the UNESCO-sponsored International Conference & Exhibition on Knowledge Parks.

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