Five leading companies have linked with the British Council in Colombo to give undergraduates from 13 universities here and six from universities in the UK an opportunity of working on solutions for tasks relevant to the operations of some top companies here.

The Lankan companies participating in this program called IDEATORS are Laugfs Holdings, ODEL, DSI (Samson Group), Dankotuwa Porcelain and Unilever Sri Lanka.

Each company set out a task relevant to their operations, and two teams of IDEATORS were assigned to work on this task. With a timeframe of only three days, both teams executed market research, customer interviews, project planning and production to meet the challenge put to them.

Tasks set ranged from changing consumer dining patterns for Dankotuwa Porcelain, to creating a product launch campaign for Unilever and even designing and producing a new shoe for DSI with the teams evaluated by the companies on their entrepreneurial skills and final presentation.

The teams were evaluated by the various companies based on their entrepreneurial skills and their final presentation.

"The key objectives of this competition were to provide an opportunity for undergraduates to gain an insight into real business issues and to also connect undergraduates from different universities together to encourage creative and collaborative problem solving," Duncan Wilson, Deputy Director, of British Council in Colombo explained.

The IDEATORS program has been telecast on ETV since Jan. 10 when it was first aired and three more episodes between 7 pm to 8 pm on Saturdays and repeated between 10 pm and 11 pm on Tuesdays are due to run.