Winning Entrepreneurs – Illuminate Nextgen Challenge

During Week 2, seven Year 12 students participated in the illuminate: nextgen Challenge hosted by the Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand at the University of Canberra.

The illuminate: nextgen Challenge is a five-day immersive experience for high school and College students with the aim to activate the next generation of confident, creative and capable young entrepreneurs.

The Year 12 students had to develop an innovative business solution that aligned with the United Nations Future Earth Initiative. The vision of the Future Earth Initiative is to provide knowledge to address the most pressing needs of humanity including sustainable, secure and fair stewardship of food, water, biodiversity, energy, materials, and other ecosystem functions and services”.

St. Francis Xavier College had two teams participate in this immersion program.

Alannah Daly, Mia Thornton and Madeleine Woodward created MESH, an enterprise that will produce environmentally friendly fresh produce bags to sell in Canberra schools as a fundraising initiative.

Diane Magnocavallo, Georgia Langford, Katherine Dixon and Phillipa Merrick created Lunchbox Legends; an enterprise that manufactures reusable lunchboxes and provides healthy nutritious lunches for school students in Canberra to reduce soft plastics.

Over the five days the students completed a series of twelve practical tasks that related to their solution; managing large workloads and tight deadlines. The teams were awarded points for each of these tasks and St. Francis Xavier College would like to congratulate Team MESH for placing first with the Overall Best Solutions. Congratulations to Team Lunchbox Legends for placing runners up for Best Solution. In addition to this, both teams received additional awards for excellence in the different tasks that were completed.

Team: MESH

• Overall Best Solution
• Student Choice: Best Team
• Best Marketing Strategy
• Best Pitch Deck Presentation

Team: Lunchbox Legends

• Runner Up Best Solution
• Best Business Case and Financials.