My Disastrous IVP Project- Reflections

Me and my friends embarked on an Innovation Programme Project.
We were very passionate and started already during the 2010 End Of Year school holidays. However all this passion was pretty much wasted when the execution and technical aspects of the project were messed up and confused.

Our first proposed problem was that food is difficult to be kept fresh and warm when we want to bring it around. Eg. to School, to workplace, to someone
else's home.

Hence, our relative objective was to create a box shaped container that is able to keep food warm up to 2~3hours and at the same time keep the food fresh. At this point we have already made a crucial mistake. We had ignored the step of finding the existing solutions.

We could come up with many types of solutions. There are 2 main concepts.

1.
A vacuum in between the food itself and the inner layer of the box.
-This way the heat travels extremely slowly through the vacuum.

2.
Fabric encased in plastic casing. This fabric will then be stuck
to the inner layer of the box.
-This way the heat travels very slowly through the vacuum.

We came up with 6 designs for the product based on the concept itself. However, when the day came for the Draft Session, all these designs from blood and sweat would go down into the drain. Our idea of the "Heatbox" easily "shot down". Within 30 into presentation Ms. Vivien Sim presented us with a picture of a metallic bottle-like container which has a vacuum layer separating the food and the inner surface. We were speechless. All the blood and sweat and effort- all for nothing. The reception was terrible. It all revolved the fact that there are too many solutions out there already. Although the reception of the idea itself was very bad, we however learnt
much from the session. The most important thing we learnt is to be extremely sure when we search for existing solutions so as to not work on something for nothing. Similarly in life, we should do background research and preparation on the event itself beforehand. Imagine a group of soldiers that wasted their time by going to foreign land without directions- their country is probably going to perish. Similarly here, our efforts perished.
Hence it is very important to understand and establish a good base for anything we do in life.