Determined to take on new challenges, 25 high school students came together for the virtual MIT Innovation Academy: Student Bootcamp amid third wave. The student bootcamp is an intense weeklong innovation capacity building program that is designed to activate their entrepreneurial mindsets and acquire a better understanding of the method for starting a successful venture.
Working in teams of five, these young innovators learnt about the MIT disciplined entrepreneurship framework and identified problems they’re eager to solve around the theme of healthy cities. From that, they’re then exposed to different technological tools and design principles that enabled them to produce a viable business model with a digital prototype.
By the end of the bootcamp, all teams were required to produce a 5-minute video pitch and the outcomes were highly impressive. From helping athletes to elderly to teenagers, their ideas and solutions ranged from creating an app to 3D-modelling hardware devices. Judges were amazed by the level of comprehensiveness and how well these projects were put together in such a short period of time.
According to MIT Professor Bill Aulet, author of “Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup”, the essence of entrepreneurship is having the spirit of a pirate and the discipline and execution skills of a NAVY Seal. Not only did all the students embrace the spirit of a pirate by tackling problems with creativity, they also demonstrated great agility and adaptability by working collaboratively against the limitations of a virtual experience.
Click here to check out the work of our students under “Student Projects”.