The Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship thrives in part due to the professionals who lend their time and expertise to our programmes, helping to connect our students to current industry practice. We are thankful to the DesignThinkers Group, who recently supported our Get Good Done weekend hackathon through facilitating a design thinking tutorial run within the programme.

Business partners Martin Sawbridge and Darryl McClay discuss the discipline of Design Thinking with Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Programme Manager Sinead Watson.

Connor Talbot, a final-year electrical engineering student, is the co-founder of Prosthet-X, a start-up that aims to make prosthetics with recyclable materials that are cheaper, faster and more comfortable than existing options. Prosthet-X recently won the TechWeek competition ON:Futures in Tech and have been receiving mentorship through our Founders Hatchery. Connor discusses the start of his entrepreneurial journey, what it has taken to get this far and where he is headed next.

Staff of the University of Auckland are invited to contact the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship to run LEGO Serious Play workshops for their staff or students. In particular, Unleash Space staff are interested in facilitating the use of LEGO Serious Play in curricula.LEGO Serious Play was founded by Swiss professors in the 1990s. It is a method of facilitation that can be used to explore a huge variety of topics such as innovation, values, team culture and processes. Staff at the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship are accredited LEGO Serious Play facilitators and are able to facilitate workshops for staff and students at the University.

More people than ever are buying clothes and shoes online, and for good reason: it’s quicker, cheaper, and there’s more to choose from. It used to be that wanting to try things on first was a major obstacle to people purchasing on the internet. But like most things born out of convenience, people got used to it. A lot of companies over the years have tried to fix that last hurdle with things like blended-reality and 3D body-scanning mirrors that let shoppers ‘virtually’ try on clothes. But with shoes, that same hi-tech focus has been somewhat lacking, something which Auckland-based tech company StrutFit is now looking to dramatically change.

For most individuals, using a phone or laptop couldn’t be easier. But for thousands of people around the world, scrolling, swiping and clicking can be a lot harder, even impossible, to do. They might be paralysed from the neck down or they might have difficulty speaking, leaving them excluded from a major tool for communication in today’s world.
This is where Nous comes in. Developed by Velocity spin-out social enterprise Thought-Wired, Nous consists of a wearable headset that allows individuals to control assistive software by blinking. While the hardware for Nous is manufactured by a third-party company, the software is made by Thought-Wired’s multidisciplinary team who have been developing novel assistive technologies for almost seven years.

Fourth year Law and Arts student Bronte Page has created her own adaptation of the Settlers of Catan board game, inspired by elements from The Lord of The Rings novels.

Hundreds gathered to listen, learn, cheer, dance and celebrate at the 2019 Innovation Challenge prize giving held on May 24.
The Innovation Challenge is a key event for the University of Auckland’s entrepreneurship programme Velocity. Students and Staff are invited to share a venture idea to solve a problem, big or small. Each 1,000 word entry is assessed and considered for a $1,000 prize with 40 prizes up for grabs. Categories included the School of Computer Science Big Data prize, the AI prize and the Female Founder prize.

For the students in the Socius VR team taking part in Summer Lab was a way for them to find out what it meant to be an entrepreneur and to use the skills from their degrees in a more practical setting. Little did they know that in just six short weeks they would go from strangers to business partners and be flown out to Barcelona to present their startup at the mSchools Social Development Goals (SDG) competition.

It is a well-established fact the innovation comes from diversity. So it was of no surprise to staff of the Business School’s Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship that some radical ideas were generated at our Get Good Done programme by the diverse cohort of more than 60 students who participated in this weekend ideas hackathon. Sponsored by the Ministry of Youth Development, Get Good Done tasks participants to come up with solutions to some of the biggest environmental, social, and cultural issues of our time – based on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The programme attracted participants from a kaleidoscope of cultures, interests, experiences and knowledge.

VentureLab is the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s incubator programme, open by invitation only to winners of the Velocity 100K challenge competition. Over the course of six months, VentureLab participants have access to a wealth of resources including a board of advisors, a $10,000 stipend per team, access to further funds and university resources, dedicated desk space within the University’s innovation hub Unleash Space and mentorship. One of those mentors is VentureLab Manager Dana McKenzie.