OxCreative

Bad Business Ethics at the University of Portsmouth

I try to avoid ranting within the OxCreative blog but I stumbled upon a document that really annoyed me. Whilst studying at the University of Portsmouth I competed in their “enterprise challenge for business” in 2005.

My business idea was to set up a creative agency which would source external work and give students and supply it to freelancing students. The agency would allocate the work and project managed each task (overseeing and ensuring it is to a high standard). For the project management and finding of work, the agency would take a slice of the revenue and would be self-sufficient and eventually profitable.

My idea was rejected and I thought nothing more of it. A few months later, in early 2006, I was discussing with a friend the idea that I submitted in the Enterprise Challenge and how I was unsuccessful. He advised me that the University of Portsmouth had approached someone to set up an agency in the same way my original idea was given to the University of Portsmouth – it even had a name… Purple Cube. My heart dropped… surely an educational organisation would not stoop as low to actually steal ideas from students through the means of a competition? Well it turned out they did.

I contacted the department in charge of the Enterprise challenge and was promptly called in for a meeting. They advised me that they had planned the idea a very long time ago and it was not anything to do with the enterprise challenge (this is important later).

I stated I did not wish to argue ownership of the idea but simply wanted to know why my idea was not good enough if it was already something that the University of Portsmouth was looking into? After all, my idea was to create a service/business that not only was profitable but also gave something back – in this case, it would allow students to gain experience and earn cash so when they graduate they are ready to start their creative careers. I certainly didn’t want the project to stop.

I was told that they would like me to be involved with the project but after lots of calls and emails back and forth they eventually stop responding to me and I did not hear any more about it.

Flash forward to today and I found the following in a University of Portsmouth document which you can download from www.port.ac.uk/aboutus/theuniversity/downloads/filetodownload,92912,en.pdf

The extract above highlighted in yellow discusses how the enterprise challenge can help students set up businesses and use prize money to develop their ideas. it then goes on directly to say that “Purple Cube is a student-run company that takes in external projects and gives the students to get used to working on real customers on real projects”. This would imply that a student submitted an idea, won the enterprise challenge and used the prize money supplied by the University of Portsmouth to develop Purple Cube… WRONG! The University of Portsmouth stole my idea (I still have emails and docs including entry forms as proof), approached others to implement it and after not being able to find someone to complete the project, set it up themselves.

For an organisation such as the University of Portsmouth, who even have a course unit entitled “business ethics”, it must be said that this is a disgusting breach of trust between the University and a student and such dishonest behaviour needs to be brought to public attention.

Shame on the University of Portsmouth!