A glimpse into the MQBS Teen Business Builders Holiday Camp✨

During the school holidays, we hosted our first 3-day holiday camp for 17 students from 9 schools! It was the Macquarie Business School Teen Business Builders Camp, and it was an absolute blast.

For three days, the Macquarie University Incubator was abuzz with the sounds of young founders building, interviewing, pitching and collaborating. It was an exhilarating experience for all involved. 

Students were guided through the program by experienced business owners/startup founders and educators from the MQ Incubator x Young Wisdom Secondary Schools Program, including: Shahe, Savannah, Georgia and James. But they also got to hear from many, MANY other kind and generous people along the way! We'll name a few of them below, but huge thanks goes out to everyone who helped make this wonderful experience possible.🙏✨

A highlight of Day 1 was our very first guest talk; an insight-rich presentation from MQBS' own Ralf Wilden on how to create value for customers and what this really entails. It was a strong and timely start for students starting to reframe their 'ideas' or 'solutions' into specific products, services and experiences that people will want to buy.  Ralf is a Professor of Strategy & Innovation and Associate Dean Research (Training & Performance) at Macquarie Business School. 

A second Day 1 highlight was our round-robin customer discovery interviews, where every founder had the opportunity to interview 11 guests from the MQ Incubator resident founder community. Students had the opportunity to interview them, not just as fellow business owners, but as potential customers for their emerging products/services. It was an opportunity to validate or challenge lines of thinking and keep building in the direction of real customer preferences. 

During Day 2, students got to Deep Dive with various MQ Incubator founders including May, Nadja, Ben and James on their various exciting startup ventures. There was additional building time, with a close focus on what the most actionable prototype or 'Minimum Viable Product' might look like for each team. We placed a lot of emphasis on developing a first iteration that is very achievable, even if it's limited to their own school context at first. We then enjoyed another thought-provoking talk from Monica Ren, who is a Lecturer in the MQBS Department of Management and a researcher with the Innovation, Strategy and Entrepreneurship Research Centre.

This was followed by another set of interviews with guest mentors, including Monica, from across Macquarie Business School and MQ Incubator. Students should be commended on how they leveraged these opportunities by asking good questions, really listening, and judiciously considering which tips to apply and when. The quick evolution of students' ideas, business models and brands was immediately obvious to us facilitators. 

"A really fun but educational experience and definitely taught useful skills needed in the future. It was also really cool to talk to/interview a bunch of startup founders, so overall a really exciting experience - absolutely recommend!" - Student Founder

On Day 3, we got to hear inspiring startup pitches from MQ Incubator founders including Ana, Jimbo and May as students embarked on preparing their next pitches (this time to parents and siblings) to round out the camp experience. Our ultimate pitch event was a lot of fun with 14 pitches in total - 13 of them live in person, with 1 video pitch being submitted. We invited the audience to provide encouragement and questions via Slido, which resulted in 69 comments! They included many valuable nuggets of wisdom and messages of support, all of which are greatly appreciated.

A huge congrats to all 14 startups who successfully pitched after so much learning, iteration and courage on the fly. We look forward to keeping in touch and following your next steps! 

👏BudgetBuddies, Class Sync, Genivate, Tier'd, estora.AI, Tapin, TimeBank, LogoLabs, Matte Mist, SearchSweeper, Japanese Bento Box For Vegans, GenLink, Boomerang Bins and First Home Solutions.👏

It was great to see Boomerang Bins in attendance, who had just placed 3rd at the Term 3 Ideas Challenge Pitch Night a week earlier! The same kudos goes out to BudgetBuddies, who won the People's Choice Award at our Term 1 Ideas Challenge Pitch Night earlier in the year.  We also saw other students continue from the Ideas Challenge into camp with new ideas, including the founders of: estora.AI, Tapin and GenLink. It was nice to welcome some returning founders as well as so many new faces!

To all our students... You're all stars for spending part of your precious holidays this way - it bodes very well for your current ventures and future endeavours!✨ 

A final word of thanks to Macquarie Business School for their generous support in making this camp possible, with the contributions mentioned above and so much more.🙏

Would you (or your child, or students) be interested in attending a future holiday camp at MQ Incubator?

You can subscribe to receive our email updates here, or simply email us at hello@youngwisdom.com.au so we can keep you in mind for next time.