Students recognised in innovation and entrepreneurship competition

The tenth round of the XJTLU Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition was successfully held at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University.

The finals of the competition, had 13 student teams compete with each other in roadshows about their start-up business proposals and where they received professional comments and advice from experts in enterprise investment and management.
After fierce competition in the project presentations and the Q&A session with judges, the Ozobot team won the laurel, and both the Genie Bunny team and the Internship Development team won second prize.

This tenth competition was jointly hosted by Student Admissions and Career Development Offices and the International Innovation Hub at XJTLU. Participants from various programmes, including BSc Economics and Finance, BA Accounting, BA International Business with a Language, BSc Financial Mathematics, and BEng Industrial Design too part with projects covering diverse themes such as cultural innovation, scientific creation, on-campus mutual aid and campaigns for public welfare.

In his opening speech to the event, Professor Youmin Xi, executive president of XJTLU said:, “Knowledge learned from class alone is not enough for one to take hold in society. Therefore, coaching on entrepreneurship is not simply about helping students to start up new businesses, but also it demonstrates to students that they need to equip themselves with competence in communication, cooperation, innovation and leadership.”

“Innovation” and “entrepreneurship” were the two key words of the competition. “To innovate means one needs to think outside of the box and be willing to make break throughs and explore all possibilities. The goal of innovation-oriented education is not only about cultivating talents, but also about serving the community and integrating the interactions with corporations and society into daily teaching,” added Professor Xi.

He also alluded to XJTLU’s exploration in Syntegrative Education, of which, a crucial part is education about entrepreneurship.

“Education about entrepreneurship will integrate both professional and industry education. The ultimate purpose is to benefit all members. XJTLU is also renowned as a university for entrepreneurs, but we never stop making more progress,” he said.

Qiaoyan Lin, team leader of the Ozobot team, is a PhD candidate of the Department of Environmental Sciences at XJTLU.
Qiaoyan said that Ozobot was produced by the team, and is designed for the education of programming for children. It will popularise knowledge about artificial intelligence to children at the target age of five to 14 years old.

She said: “Robots, as a trend of the near future, can be combined with child education and the domestic market of education of programming for children is gradually expanding. As a mother myself, I also hope teenagers in my country will have the opportunity to gain access to the most leading-edge products for education.”

Wei Bao, general manager of Suzhou Kuda Venture Capital Co., Ltd. as well as one of the judges in this competition, commented that the students of XJTLU have excellent execution ability. Once coming up with an idea, they start market investigation immediately and most projects come to life.

He was impressed with the entrepreneurship of XJTLU. “They have managed to get down to business and work on their start-ups, which is a commendable attitude. XJTLU has offered great incubation and promotion to student entrepreneurs,” he said.

By Yingzhou Liu and Sihan Liu
Translation by Yiling Yu, edited by Guojuan Wang and Jacqueline Bánki