By The City of Joondalup’s future business leaders and entrepreneurs
Future of business in good hands with innovative entrepreneurs of the future
The City of Joondalup’s future business leaders and entrepreneurs were on show earlier this month at the Just Start It Gala Awards Night at Sacred Heart College in Sorrento.
Just Start It is an inter-high school competition run across the Perth metropolitan area and supported by the City, which aims to equip students for the job market of the future and nurture jobs creators as well as job dependants.
This year the program involved more than 50 classes of students.
Based on Silicon Valley’s ‘Lean Start Up’ methodology, students learnt in teams of ‘Hackers, Hawkers and Hipsters’ – meaning computer gurus, marketing lovers and creative types.
The program assigns skilled industry mentors to classes to provide input, inspiration and guidance to students on building a mobile app or creating a business start-up.
Ten teams made it through to the gala final to present their ideas to a ‘shark tank’ style panel of experts, including representatives from technology companies Microsoft and iiNet.
Sacred Heart College students Madelyn Summer, Tara Prentice, Helen Moe, Ailish Normal, Stacie Blott and Louella Eaton were one of the 10 teams thanks to their ‘Feed It Back’ app.
The app concept was to allow for effective communications between food businesses and their customers via the use of a QR Code on receipts.
Getcha from Como Secondary College took out the top prize of $5000 and the Just Start IT 2015 trophy.
Program Director Lainey Weiser said the efforts of all students in this year’s competition showed that the gap between education ending and the business world beginning continued to close.
“The outcomes have been incredible, with students creating solutions to problems that are beyond innovative. We create classrooms full of thinkers, and eventually schools of job creators and game changers,” she said.
Joondalup Mayor Troy Pickard said the City supported Just Start It because it aligned with the City’s activity on employment and skills development of the future workforce and supporting innovation.
“The City of Joondalup is the driver of innovation and economic growth for the north-west metropolitan region of Perth and boasts one of the largest concentrations of knowledge based activity in Western Australia.
“The innovative work being done by Sacred Heart students and the many other young people in this program provides our current leaders with great confidence that our digital future is in safe hands.
“The City’s Digital City strategy positions Joondalup as a centre of growth and innovation and presents exciting opportunities for business stakeholders and representatives from the education and health sectors and also presents new and exciting ways for the community to access information and services.
“We are already home to state of the art research institutes, a major health campus, leading education and training organisations and dynamic business clusters, and the City is well positioned to maximise the benefits of the digital economy and the technological advances ahead.”