ENACTUS is a worldwide organization which stimulates students at colleges and universities to think about "social entrepreneurship": for profit businesses which focus on products and services which solve social challenges. The main theme is entrepreneurship of course, but the students are stimulated to "think out of the box". Many large corporations such as KPMG and WALMART use this worldwide competition to recruit new employees.
Each year college and university teams compete regionally and then nationally. The winner of each country goes to the "World Cup". Two years ago the World Cup was hosted in Beijing, China, and I was by chance in that conference center (see my blog posts of October or November 2014). In 2015 it was hosted in Durban, South Africa, and this year the event was hosted in Toronto. I attended a lunch for college & university administrators and afterwards watched some of the competition.
There were 36 countries competing: see them listed in the photo above. On Friday (after two days of business presentations - or also called "pitches") there were 16 teams left of which the last 4 were chosen (I was not able to stay to see that).
The Canadian team (from Memorial University) was hopeful to become one of the last four...
Before that moment there were a number of presentations from ENACTUS organizers, corporate sponsors and a few former ENACTUS competitors who explained how they had made their business idea a successful reality. There was also a forum on discussions around solving the scarcity of water.
An electric atmosphere with lots of music and "hype", but again (just like in Beijing 2014) a very inspiring event to see so many engaged young professionals who want to be entrepreneurs and at the same time good corporate citizens.
No comments:
Post a Comment