The Techno Innovation Challenge at ITC
The program is organised by ITC with the C-NEUF project funded by AUF, co-funded by the Erasmus+ program of the European Union in the framework of FoodSTEM project and sponsored by Khmer Enterprise and Smart Axiata !
It is also supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport and the Ministry of Economy and Finance.It’s a four weeks entrepreneur and tech startup competition program, that starts on February 20th, 2021, with activities mostly held during the weekend to allow all students and young entrepreneurs to engage.
It’s a four weeks entrepreneur and tech startup competition program, that starts on February 20th, 2021, with activities mostly held during the weekend to allow all students and young entrepreneurs to engage.
The TICC focuses on 4 thematics
Agriculture and Food Transformation
Mechatronic and Robotic
Energy Management
Information and Communication Technologies
Background of TICC
Institute of Technology of Cambodia (ITC) is a public engineering school in Cambodia with a well-known and recognized achievement in Cambodia Higher education industry. ITC has a clear long objective and mission. The fourth objective of ITC is to train engineers to innovation and entrepreneurship, in order to create high skilled jobs and answers to future challenges.
In 2017, ITC was pleased to be selected the only one to pilot the MS2W Institutional Innovation Challenge, which is named as “Techno Innovation Challenge Cambodia” in Cambodia during the first quarter of FY2019 by the USAID Connecting the Mekong through the Education and Training (USAID COMET) Project to be organized in November 18 – December 9, 2017, at Institute of Technology of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The program is based on Texas A&M University (TAMU)’s Innovation Challenge, called Aggies Invent.
Objectives of the TICC
Techno Innovation Challenge Cambodia is a competition program which students from different skills team up, design, build and pitch their innovative STEM-based solutions for solving a real-world program within 4 weeks duration, organized by Institute of Technology of Cambodia. Teams need to prove and test their ideas and prototypes through a customer interview and some business research to compete with other teams on Semi Final to advance to the final round. After the challenge, student teams especially engineering students have minimum viable products (prototypes) that are working, useful, and validated from customer and business perspectives.
The challenge event will be four-weekend duration that is mostly performed over a weekend for universities students to team up, design, build and pitch their innovative solutions under one of the themes: Internet of Thing or e-Commerce (ICT), Education or Health, and Agriculture or Energy. It has a transformational effect in students by:
- Providing them necessary technology, materials, mentorship and training to support their innovation.
- Working in teams where they have to share ideas, brainstorm, and deliver the steps toward a solution in deadlines staged throughout the experience
- Meeting deadlines requiring teams to make decisions about their solution, determine a path toward implementation, and build the solution according to a schedule
- Developing and practicing effective communication skills as they “sell” their solution to a panel of judges as they compete for placement in the competition. Competition provides the focus and is like a pitch they will need to compete for funding for their project in industry or as a startup.
- Providing them a situation that is as much like their first job in a high-performance team as possible in a short period in a university setting
The objectives of TICC to be the vibrant platform where Young Cambodian Students come to activate their potential and move their leadership, creativity and Innovation to the next level. And revealing Student’s potential to all Stakeholders and Interested Bodies:
- Promote both technical and entrepreneurship on STEM, especially Engineering and Technology.
- Promote students’ Innovation and make best use of their skills.
- Promote innovative a STEM-based solution for solving a real-world problem.
Techno Innovation Challenge 2021
It’s a four weeks entrepreneur and tech startup competition program, that starts on February 20th, 2021.
The participants will be teamed up by teams of 6 maximum and will be mentored during the whole challenge to be able to transform their ideas in a viable prototype.
The projects will be judged on innovation, feasibility, business planning and prototypes production.
- The top three projects will get a money price to start their business (from 2000$ to 1000$)
- the top 6 to 8 projects will be pre-incubated for one year at ITC, be able to benefit from working space and technical facilities of ITC (labs), have a coaching throughout the year, and benefit from a 10 weeks training program in entrepreneurship.
FoodSTEM project will specifically support the pre-incubation of winning projects in Agriculture and Food Transformation thematics, provide support on the training and labs facilities.
The students can register to the program individually (to be teamed up during the first weekend), or by teams. They can register to the program even if they don’t have an innovative idea of their own, but would like to be involved in the competition, the first weekend of the competition will team them up according to the complementarity of their knowledge and skills.
The applications are open until February 1st, 2021, and students can register by filling this form online:
For individual registrations : http://bit.ly/TICC2021-registrationform
For team registrations : https://forms.gle/hc8aZm4wkEAP4TVf6
Here is the Facebook page of the challenge : https://www.facebook.com/innovationchallengecambodia
TICC program flow
Activity Contents
There were 22 individual applicants and 51 group-applicants from 18 different institutions have applied in our program. Among those groups, 41 % focused on Agriculture and Food Transformation theme. Students were from more than 20 different majors; 87% were Engineer students, and 13% were Non-Engineer students. Among the applicants, 46% were female
(February 20th, 21st, 28th, 2021, Online)
The first week and second week have been known as the training and building team session that all the candidates have to join to finalize their purpose of startup and make the consultation with their provided mentors and our invited specialist who came to share and tutor during the program. We have reached to show up some points briefly as below:
- The first weekend was Intensive Design Experience. The shortlisted applicants teamed up with 3 to 6 members. The team started to design the solutions for solving a real-world problem and build the prototype as realistic as possible.
- Connecting Mentors with groups
- On the second weekend, different workshops and mentoring were provided to the teams.
- Teams went out to do customer interview.
Techno Innovation Challenge 2021 Activities
