The 2019 National Brilliant Business Kids Festival
We have so many great memories from the 2019 National Brilliant Business Kids Festival. We are beyond grateful for all the support that the event has seen over the past two years. Our goal was to ignite a flame of innovation within each student who went through the Entrepreneurial Learning in Action program, to truly change the way young people are educated moving forward and highlight the potential of student-led ideas.
Judging by the pitches we received during the national pitch competition, we strongly believe this goal has been realised and are beyond proud of all the students who participated in the 2019 Brilliant Business Kids Festival and National Pitch Competition. We can attribute this success to three criteria: Brilliant Speakers, Brilliant Masterclasses and Brilliant Kids.
Brilliant Speakers
Over 100 students and teachers were involved in a full day of masterclasses, workshops and panel discussions led by industry leaders focusing on entrepreneurship and innovation. Young entrepreneurs such as Liam Scanlan (Founder and Director at Eat Your Water) and Elisa Lillicrap (Co-Founder at Chance.io) both attributed their success to a burning passion to do something outside of their designated classroom environment, a testament to what the Entrepreneurial Learning in Action course is attempting to achieve.
“The Brilliant Business Kids Festival is an unreal opportunity for high school students. It gives them access to resources that they would not normally find within the classroom – that are vital to running a business and activating creativity. I love entrepreneurship and wish I had access to events like this when I was in high school a few years ago.”
– Liam Scanlan, Founder and Director at Eat Your Water.
It was great to hear of their highs, lows and funny stories such as Liam being given generic responses from his high school teachers in his yearly reports (we’ve all been there!) to Elisa meeting and shaking hands with the 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton! Both of these outstanding young people achieved brilliant feats with their bare hands and determination, the sky’s the limit when you chase something you want badly.
Brilliant Masterclasses
To facilitate learning at the festival, a series of masterclasses were created with industry leaders to work with students on current issues, work with problem solving, soft skills and rapid hackathons to engage in a new type of learning.
Students were put in these environments to engage, work with and deliver content relevant not only to the curriculum which is taught using the Entrepreneurial Learning in Action course but relevant to life outside of a classroom. Aside from the learning aspects of these workshops, students had fun solving problems, engaging with each other and getting the chance to work outside of their comfort zones, especially in the rapid hackathon utilising AI Intelligence in partnership with Microsoft.
We loved, most of all, having Brian Dorricott (CSIRO Lead Facilitator ON Accelerator Lean Innovation and Startup Programs) on hand to teach students how to pitch an idea effectively. After each session, it was a mad rush for students competing in the national pitch final, later in the day, as they frantically refined their presentations like true entrepreneurs!
Brilliant Kids
It was amazing to see how students created solutions for their local communities and thinking about how these ideas could be translated into business ventures. The festival was created for this reason, as a means to give young people the opportunity to show their potential in solving real world problems and to help their communities.
The winners of the National Pitch Final truly embodied what it means to be an entrepreneur leading with their simple yet efficient designs, passion backing their ideas, the way they told their stories and research regarding the scalability of their business.
The pitch competition was divided into two sessions: the AgriFutures program participants and the students from metropolitan who had focussed on the UN Sustainability Challenge.
The AgriFutures program winners, Georgia and Jorja from Cleve Area School in South Australia, successfully sold their idea of ‘The Handy Trough’, an innovative way for farmers to monitor their water utilising mobile phone app technology.
The UN Sustainability Challenge winners, Noah, Jayde, Jayden and Luka from Marcellin College Randwick told their story of their business idea, ‘Scoby & Co.’, an idea created after seeing the sustainability crisis abroad, pertaining to clothing and how materials are wasted, and instead turning these used garments into opportunities for new designs to prosper.
It was an amazing feat to witness these teenage innovators from across Australia, pitching their ideas with such passion and an eagerness to bring about change for the better. It would be an understatement to say that all of the students who pitched are absolutely brilliant business kids, no matter the outcome. Richard Hainsworth sums this idea of cross-cultural learning nicely in that:
“For kids living on the same continent, they looked on as if worlds apart but quickly realised what could learn from one another creating an invaluable experience and by result a more connected society.”
– Richard Hainsworth, Future Growth Teacher Brigidine College
We would like to thank our sponsors and partners from this event and are hoping for an even more brilliant event in 2020.
