How to present your case?

A team of four MPM students were selected as part of a global case competition, to present their ideas on how One Laptop Per Child could reach 10 million children in 5 years. I was a part of that team, and I wanted to share with you all the things we learned on how to make our presentation to these judges stand-out. The judges were C-level executives from various not-for-profit and for-profit organizations, including the Director of Business Development, OLPC.

Research
We spent a month researching everything about OLPC, everything from news, reviews, talking to people in the field, talking with professors on several angles to look at the case, etc. We got data from the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Census, articles published by the White House, etc. We talked with Amy, who had spent some time at the grass-roots level actually working with the OLPC XO and with the winners of the case challenge in 2010. All this copious research helped us create a profile of facts, and numbers, which would later strengthen our case.

Focusing on an idea
This was the hardest part of the whole process. Whether it is a case study, or actually working with your own idea, it is extremely important to focus on a clear solution. We started working on a 30 second elevator pitch that would define our solution and make its parts clear and concise. We would use this pitch when describing the essence of our idea to others: why are we doing this, what is the current scenario, what is our specific solution and why us. If you can explain it to a friend or a colleague with no background in your field, then you have done a good job. I tried it with my mom :)

Making the presentation
We had to present our idea to the judges in 12 minutes, and use that time for the actual presentation or Q&A as per our discretion. After viewing many TED talks on how to present an idea, we decided that it would be a 2/3 presentation (8mins) and 1/3 Q&A session (4mins) so, once again having a very clear message that could be conveyed in that time was important. All our slides had to content dense, in that, each slide should be able to tell the story, in and of itself. The presenter would only provide additional detail, or walk the audience through data/graphs. We removed every extraneous detail that did not add more information to our flow and tried telling a story with each slide. "Storifying" your slides hooks and engages the audience, and makes them feel a part of the process, instead of just being a silent spectator. Throwing a couple of jokes allows you to gauge the level of engagement you have from the audience :)

Keeping it simple and feasible
I know I mentioned this already, but I cannot stress on the importance of keeping it simple. We spent a month working out our solution, and knew the background, history and details of the case inside and out. But our judges (except the one from OLPC) were completely new to the case, and more than 1/3 of our audience was from 2 other tracks (Housing and Energy, we were Education). So we stayed away from any acronyms, and practiced the presentation several times to make sure we stayed away from superfluous information.
We also tried to really understand the problems that were faced by the organization and worked on a idea that could be achieved starting Monday (the competition was on Saturday). This made our solution believable, in fact, each of us used our actual experience to ensure that our ideas could be put into action immediately. Feasibility is key, and this was resonated by all the judges through-out the competition.

Overall, I believe that a great idea can be completely lost in a not-so-great presentation, but a well presented solution can make a good idea great! If you think of any additional suggestions, please share :)