By Jacqueline Ramos and Isabelle Lee
Entrepreneurs
We recently participated in Entrepreneurs in Action (EIA), a four-day annual activity run by the Young Enterprise Scheme. In this year’s EIA, we had the opportunity to meet 76 other business-minded secondary students from all across New Zealand. Over the course of four days, we were presented with two business challenges for which we needed to propose a solution.
The first challenge was to come up with a solution to create a more sustainable and circular economy and the second challenge was to find a way to grow the Māori economy in a way that would ensure intergenerational success for iwi. We were expected to submit a two-page business case for both challenges and then pitch our proposed solution to a panel of judges.
We were all split into different smaller teams. Working as part of a small team meant that we had to learn to listen and be open to each other’s ideas, which we did really well and supported each other through the challenges. This was a great opportunity to gain leadership experience as everyone took turns leading different discussions and helped develop our public speaking skills as we presented our pitch to a large audience.
Overall, EIA was a very good experience that enabled us to delve deeper and learn more about the business and/or corporate world. EIA was an experience one for the books!
