In the ASIA VENTURE CHALLENGE 2013 held during 6th – 8th, March, 2013, the team - Forerunner from Shantou University advised by Prof. Jingqiang Wu has won two awards - MAI Challenge Round Winner and Social Impact Awards by John E.Butler. The three members of Forerunner are Shihua Liu from MBA 2012, Jiaqi Zhao from Accounting 2010 and Ke Zhao from International Trade 2010.
The ASIA VENTURE CHALLENGE, one of the Asian most influential venture plan competitions, was hosted every year by Thammasat Business School to encourage postgraduate students in business administration programs across the Asia to become more entrepreneurial. The final winner of the competition will go to Texas University in USA for the Venture Labs Investment Competition in the month of May,2013.
In this year’s competition,12 competing teams from 8 countries advanced to the Semi-final. Forerunner was one of the 12 teams, as the first year’s experience of participating the competition as well as one of the only two teams from China to advance in the Semi-Final. The project proposed by Forerunner is a kind of community network platform called “Low-carbon-lifestyle.com,” which involves normal users, enterprises of low-carbon products, government and NGOs. It mainly focuses on the theme of carbon reduction action, attracts every single citizen to recognize and learn low-carbon knowledge as well as take the real action of low-carbon in their daily life by the socializing philosophy, points system, B2C low-carbon mall and other functions on the website. It also provides with enterprises of low-carbon products the platform of promoting low-carbon business, the government and NGOs the platform to organize social activities of low-carbon to achieve the final goal of both economic and environmental benefit of all people. The proposal of low-carbon won many appriciations from all the judges, organizer and other competitor teams by its theme of innovation and environmental protection.
The competition was held during 6th – 8th, March in this year. In the afternoon of the first day, every team was required to decorate the exhibit booths. The Forerunner Team designed and decorated their booth with an eye-catching green style to fit the product features of “low-carbon and environmental protection”. The designed exhibit booth attracted many visitors for further enquiry of the business plan and product information.
In the evening, “60-Second Elevator Pitch”, representatives from the 12 Semi-Finalists were required to promote their products in a 60-second short oral presentation. Our team representative Jiaqi Zhao’s performance won warm applause and cheers from the audiences.
The semi-final round was held on 7th March, the 12 Semi-Finalist teams were randomly selected to compete in one of the three groups. Each team was required to make a 15-minute presentation, followed by a 15-minute question-and-answer session with the judges. As a first time of participation,the ForerunnerTeam had excellent performance in presentation.
The Challenge Round was held on 8th March, Forerunner team was well prepared after full attention to feedbacks from judges in the first semi-final round.
After the competition, the three participants expressed their great harvest from the precious experience. They said the ASIA VENTURE CHALLENGE provided a platform to enrich their experience, broaden their visions, improve their practice abilities, deepen the understanding of professional knowledge and improve their oral communication skills in English. Moreover, this competition strengthens the communication between Shantou University and other universities around the world.
