New Venture Champs
View photos from the event
A record number of high school students applied to this year’s Manitoba High School New Venture Championships, says Amy Briscoe, program coordinator at the Stu Clark Centre for Entrepreneurship. Located at the U of M’s Asper School of Business, the Stu Clark Centre hosted the day-long event, where students and teams from more than 30 schools competed for best business plan, idea pitch, logo and trade show display.
“We received 55 applications and over 125 students attended,” says Briscoe. “The winners were awarded over $20,000 in educational awards, generously donated by our sponsors. Many of the business ideas we saw this year gave a familiar product a creative twist, or solved a problem we can all relate to. These young entrepreneurs really get what starting a business venture is all about.”
2015 winners
Business Plan:
- DigiParent (Centre scolaire Léo-Remillard)
- Hockey Knight Enterprises (Kildonan East Collegiate)
- Body Sugar (Birtle Collegiate)
- Vall é (Miles MacDonell Collegiate)
Trade Show:
- TecHealth (St. John’s-Ravenscourt School)
- Spectra (Kildonan East Collegiate)
- Coffee Scrub (Vincent Massey)
Idea Pitch:
- Urbin (St. John’s-Ravenscourt School)
- Tune Box (Dakota Collegiate)
- Power Up (St John’
s-Ravenscourt School)
Logo Competition:
- Urbin (St. John’s-Ravenscourt School)
- Green Tea Café (Tec Voc High School)
- Let’s Post (Birtle Collegiate)
Top School in Manitoba:
- St. John’s-Ravenscourt School
- Kildonan East Collegiate
Examples of products and services
“The Body Sugar team produces exfoliating scrubs, bubble bars, bath bombs, and cupcake-shaped soaps in a range of scents and colours. Body Sugar products are entirely organic and mineral-based. The product, including packaging, cost around $2.00-$3.00 to make. Each Body Sugar teammate has sold, created, named, packaged and accounted for a range of bath products.”
“DigiParent is a small business focused on developing a computer application to help parents limit the time their kids spend on the computer. Parents can program DigiParent to shut down the computer after a specified length of time. A second option is to program the application so it simply notifies the children when their time limit has been reached.”
“Hockey Knight Enterprises creates quality hockey stick bottle openers called Wristers. The competitive advantage of the Wrister compared to other bottle openers is that each is unique, handmade, environmental friendly, and part of the profits go to support charity. Each Wrister comes from a different section of the hockey stick – no two items are exactly the same. By collecting broken or used hockey sticks from communities around Winnipeg, Wristers also prevent additional landfill waste.”
“Tim’s Sweet Honey Stix provides sweet, natural honey in the form of a sealed straw that releases the honey into a warm beverage. The product can be described as a straw with honey already inside that releases as you stir your coffee/tea, so that customers don’t have to deal with the sticky mess.”
“TecHEALTH is a start-up business with a powerful mission: to improve healthcare using technology. Many companies have already saturated the health market, and the technology currently employed by the industry is often outdated and incredibly hard to use. As a result, Canada lags far behind other developed nations when it comes to integrating technology with medicine. By providing simple software solutions to everyday healthcare problems, TecHEALTH will help patients, physicians, and ultimately, medicine as a whole.”