1. What is COMMUNICATION?

Communication is the medium for exchanging thoughts, opinions, information and ideas. Communication can be achieved through a range of means:

•    Oral: Speech (presentations, stories etc)
•    Visual (writing, documentation, graphics, signs, symbols, images, photographs, diagrams, sketches etc)
•    Physical (products, shapes, form, function, etc)

 

2. What is important to consider with COMMUNICATION?

The most important considerations include:
•    What is the message you are trying to communicate?
•    Who are you communicating to (potential investor, client, customer, user, competition judge)?
•    What is the best medium to communicate with to capture your audience’s attention? Different people respond to different things and different audiences require different types of communications.
•    What is the setting for your communication? What mediums are at your disposal?
•    Is what you are communicating simple and clear and easy to understand?
•    Communication involves transmitting messages between two or more people so a good communicator needs to be a good listener

3. How can you make your COMMUNICATION more effective?

For the competition you will be communicating your ideas to the judging panel in the form of an A1 poster board. To make your communication more effective:
•    Keep it brief, simple and clean. This is particularly important as it is your first communication with the audience (ie the judges).
•    Do not make it too wordy or too technical – summarise key points in short paragraphs or better still bullet points. Technical detail can be explained later, or in accompanying documentation.
•    Break it down into sections that cover the key points and make sure the flow of information is logical.
•    Get feedback on your board from people that are new to your idea to see if what you are trying to say is being received clearly and effectively.
•    Be creative, but don’t lose sight of the key messages.
•    Where the judges are unable to identify a clear winner, finalists may be required to give an oral presentation. Stick to short sound bites for an oral presentation and again, remember to keep it simple.

4. Why is it important to have strong COMMUNICATION?

Strong, effective communication is critical for the following reasons:
•    Early in the development process you will need to communicate with experts in a number of fields to determine whether the idea will work (engineers, designers, material suppliers)
•    To get development and marketing support you may need to sell your idea to potential investors (think Dragons Den!). Concise communication is often key here.
•    If you are involved in marketing and selling you need to be able to communicate with your customers.

Good communication will allow others to understand your ideas and benefit from them. Poor communication will simply confuse them.

5. Where is the best place to find out about COMMUNICATION?

There are several good sources to find out more about communication.

•    Wikipedia. A great starting point to find out about anything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication

•    American Don Clarke’s Performance Juxtaposition website. This has great pages on performance, learning, training and leadership. The link below has great information on communication
http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/leadcom.html

•   TED - ideas worth spreading TED invites a range of interesting people to talk and there are some amazing people with some very interesting commendation techniques www.ted.com

•   Apple Computers Steve Jobs (founder of Apple and CEO) is one of the best presenters in the world. Watch his presentations online and see for yourself. www.apple.com