Organised by the Institute of Innovation & Entrepreneurship (IIE), a total of 270 students from various schools and institutions joined the Youth Innovation Challenge (YIC) competition briefing and training workshop held at the SMU, School of Accountancy. This edition of YIC garnered participation response from 16 Secondary Schools, 12 Junior Colleges and 3 ITE’s from Singapore. The students were assigned into 6 groups, each of which was facilitated and conducted by trainers from JA Singapore.  

An overview of the competition details was presented by IIE together with a brief introduction about International Enterprise (IE) Singapore. Mr. Clarence Hoe of IE Singapore outlined the prizes and award criteria to all students. He shared on what is internationalization and as a concluding remark gave insight on two main strategies in achieving a strong, successful and innovative product. The pointers was “where to play” & “how to win” accompanied by the following key questions; which are the countries, is there potential market for you, how much resources do you need and how do you enter it, “whether immediately” or “in phases”.

Students engagement from the various activities conducted during the training workshop 

(For more photos, please visit our facebook photo album at https://www.facebook.com/SMUIIE)

Participating students went through 7 intensive sessions on Saturday. Learning the basic theories coupled with hands on learning applications through various range of activities, i.e. group sharing and discussions together with pitching and critique sessions. Topics ranges from basic fundamentals like what is entrepreneurship, what is innovation, brainstorming of ideas, how to create a business plan, profiling your target audience, what is product competitive advantage etc. This edition of YIC, we see promising young talents and look forward to great and innovative submissions from the various teams in 2015.

[Photo: Team SMU, IIE at the extreme right together with trainers from JA Singapore]