Every year, Stanford University in the USA holds an Entrepreneurship Week, and they set a challenge for students to create value from some everyday object.

This year's object - rubber bands. Students had a week to do something useful with as many rubber bands as they liked. The measure of success was that they should use their entrepreneurial talents to 'create value', but that could be non-monetary.

You can access videos of each of the winning entries in the contest, and gain some inspiration (and have a laugh).

But I drew a couple of interesting lessons from one of the winners. You can watch the video of the RubberbandTogether team.

It's worth noting that:

1. Their idea came about from seeing things in the world around them rather than sitting in a room brainstorming.

2. They used word of mouth - and its modern equivalent online - as their marketing tool.

3. Most importantly they realised the benefit of a short, sharp focused effort, and worked on a 24 hour campaign.

Let's think about the third point for a moment. Most people when faced with a week-long challenge would worry that it was such a short space of time - yet these guys chose to limit themselves to even less time: just one day.

The advantage this has is that it concentrates the mind, and pulls the team together with a real sense of urgent purpose - and the knowledge that it's only one day, so they might as well give it everything they've got.

If this kind of effort had been required for a week people would have started drifting away from the project by Wednesday, there'd have been arguments about it by Thursday and so on.

Plus, having a focused day made it easier for them to get the attention of the outside world, including the media.

So although entrepreneurs often wish time was like a rubber band and they could stretch it to go further. Maybe there are times when it's good to scrunch it up into a ball to get some bounce into your team and your market.