Intern Innovation Day in London

Last Thursday, 130 interns in our London office came together for an “Intern Innovation Day” to provide creative, fresh solutions to the challenges faced by three of Bloomberg’s non-profit partners.

The challenges presented by the Royal Parks Foundation,Maggie’s Centres and The Old Vic theatre ranged from the need to increase fundraising potential from the 77 million annual visitors to the Royal Parks, to recommending solutions to simplify the way cancer patients access care and health information through Maggie’s Centres, a cancer charity.

Having been briefed on a series of challenges faced by executives from the non-profits, small teams of interns put their heads together to conceive, develop and, in some cases even build, solutions to address them.

Intern teams were assembled across Bloomberg’s diverse business – from Engineering to Corporate Communications, Sales, Analytics and News – enabling interns to collaborate and complement one another’s expertise to tackle the challenges at hand. Employees from across the business also dropped by to mentor the groups and offer their insights and top tips.

The day began with the groups speaking with representatives from their relevant partner charities to better understand the challenges they were seeking to solve. The groups worked throughout the day to solidify and expand on their ideas and proposals. By the end of the day when interns pitched their final three-minute presentations, the teams had produced substantial, actionable plans. Some were even able to demonstrate prototype applications or showcase basic code.

A few examples of pitches:

Nutrition 6 Team proposed a service to improve cancer patients’ accessibility to easy, nutritious meals while undergoing treatment. They even negotiated an agreement with a leading fresh food producer to provide their goods at discounted rates to visitors to Maggie’s Centres.

Global Stars Team proposed income-generating stargazing tours in the Royal Parks. The team’s pitch was sparkling stuff, incorporating marketing materials and even a prototype website.

Old Fire Young Flame Team devised a platform and strategy for the Old Vic theatre to source local Londoners’ stories and narratives for its upcoming bicentenary project, ‘200 Voices’.

Royal Feedback Team programmed an application which aggregates and classifies all tweets related to Hyde Park using open source sentiment analysis software. This allowed them to segment tweets containing positive and negative feedback, offering the Royal Parks Foundation a vital tool to improve the visitor experience.

As intern Deanna Hallett, working with the Government Relations team, reflected, “I think we brought a keen drive and a fresh perspective. Being an intern at Bloomberg is like being in a community, so working together and getting the best results came easily. It was great to collaborate with such talented and ambitious people to generate some exciting ideas, develop them, and present it to our charity partners.”

“We came away from our time at Bloomberg really impressed by how the interns balanced the creativity of their ideas with the practicalities of how they might be delivered in the Royal Parks,” said Jessica Dash, Head of Development at the Royal Parks. ”The professionalism with which they all presented under pressure was admirable.”

Jemma Read, who oversees Bloomberg’s philanthropic programming outside of the Americas, said, “Innovation Day 2016 provided our charity partners with some great proposals to consider for implementation, while empowering the intern cohort to collaborate on a meaningful project that might one day be realized, and make a difference.“

By Dermot Neligan, Summer Communications Intern in London

Learn more about Bloomberg’s Philanthropy and Engagement.