'Out of this world' travelling exhibit wins enterprise national final

An ‘out of this world’ interactive travel exhibit has won the national final of this year’s Global Enterprise Challenge hosted by at the Albany campus last week.

Team Telecom won the challenge with their idea of interactive space training exercises for pre-teens who want to experience being an astronaut.

The Telecom team was made of eight students Kristen McKenzie (Aparima College), Erica Pope (Chilton Saint James College), Nick Foster (Havelock North High School), Jake Mickleson (John Paul College), Linda Liu (Auckland International College), Bryn Lindsay (Westlake Boys High) Gareth Jones (Rangitoto College) and Tehya Reardon (St Cuthberts).

Day one of the two day event was the Fedex International Enterprise in Action challenge. The teams were given a day to devise a product based on wool and export it to Sweden. They needed to consider the production, financial and marketing aspects of their product.

Day Two was the Global Enterprise Challenge. The students were given 24 hours to create an interactive exhibit which would be displayed in science museums around the world, celebrating human spaceflight and the future of it. Team Telecom won the challenge and the right to compete with 16 other countries in the international event.

Massey University staff provided expert seminars for all teams on marketing and finance.

Ben Richmond from Telecom, a mentor to the winning team, described working with them as a great opportunity and highly beneficial to engaging with the innovative young minds of New Zealanders. “Mentoring a team is like being proud parents watching the development of their offspring. It’s similar to what we see in a big organisation – finance interacting with marketing and communication attempting to achieve great opportunities for us to be involved in. We can’t wait to come back next year.”

Student Andrew McLaren who was part of team Massey says he thoroughly enjoyed the weekend event. “The challenge is a great opportunity to meet people and gain new experiences,” he says. “It’s also a great learning curve and really pushes you to see what you can achieve.”

The Global Enterprise Challenge is a 24-hour competition for young people aged 16-19. The New Zealand contingent involves year-12 and year-13 school pupils from around the country teaming up to solve a worldwide business issue.  All students selected to participate and represent their schools in the event received a $2000 fees bursary to use with any full-time business programme and any of the Massey campuses. Winning Team Telecom members received $5000 fees bursaries.

The overall winner was Australia with Japan taking out the award for creativity.