Although many alumni have made impressive accomplishments in their entrepreneurial journeys, they might have encountered numerous setbacks or gone through twists and turns. In order to help students plan ahead and equip themselves for business endeavours, the University seeks to cultivate their entrepreneurial spirit while enabling them to acquire relevant knowledge and experience through training and experiential activities.
In 2017, the Student Affairs Office launched a brand-new scheme Open Inno-Challenge, aiming to unleash students' creativity and enhance their entrepreneurial skills which help translate their innovative ideas into viable operations for profit and for social good. The scheme provides students with first-hand experience through various activities, including training workshops, local community tours, exchanges with entrepreneurs, and visits to overseas universities and start-up communities. Students can then submit proposals to compete for implementation funding of HK$100,000, while they will also receive multi-disciplinary resources to support the execution of awarded projects.
Following the University retitling, the Student Affairs Office has had the scheme renamed MetroChallenge and continues to bring forth new initiatives. Among others, the Entrepreneurship Month held this February launched a series of online sharing sessions on entrepreneurship, covering legal knowledge for start-ups, design thinking, social responsibility, pitching skills and business models. Past winning teams were also invited to share their insights and experiences. The sharing sessions were followed by the MetroChallenge Lab (Proof of Concept) held in May, with the aim to motivate students to materialize their ideas by developing prototypes with market validation. As of early this year, nearly 3,800 students have participated in various MetroChallenge events, while a total of 119 proposals have been received with HK$2,000,000 seed funding distributed to awarded projects.
Apart from competing for the University's entrepreneurial fund, the University also encourages students to participate in competitions and seek support from external funding. There have been many successful examples. One of them is 'Finvictus', a team of four that joined the Cyberport University Partnership Programme. Consisting of business students Dicky Lau Yu-him, Vasandani Nimisha Haresh and Minhaj Anosha and engineering student Minhaj Ramsha, the team presented a FinTech project with components in AI, blockchain and cybersecurity, and was successfully granted HK$100,000 in seed funding by the Cyberport Creative Micro Fund. Also, creative arts students Kenneth Chau Tsz-kin and Donald Mak Tsz-fung teamed up with students from other institutions to participate in the Own My Path Skills Trans-formation Training Programme organized by the HKFYG Leadership Institute. With the project 'The Cure', which aims to help people relieve stress and depression during the pandemic, the team carried off the second runner-up and bagged HK$10,000 in start-up funding.
