Published on the 08/03/2012 | Written by Newsdesk
14 groups of Information Technology students from Otago Polytechnic have pitched their business project to a panel of industry leaders in a tense ‘Dragon’s Den’ style session in Dunedin…
Among the experts present were David Quinn from Audacious, business development advisor at the Dunedin City Council, Chanel O’Brien, and Steven Walker from Upstart.
While there was the occasional display of shaky nerves, the expert panel of ‘Dragons’ were impressed with the third-year students’ innovative ideas and four-minute pitches, under pressure.
“I found the quality, diversity and focus of the potential projects to be of a high standard,” says Mr Walker, Business Coach at Upstart Business Incubator in Dunedin.
“Speaking to a number of the ‘Dragon’s Den’ team after the presentations, many expressed a desire to return around the halfway mark to see how the projects are developing and offer any advice if needed, as well as seeing the end result. They certainly have our attention.”
Projects proposed included an online system developed to encourage visitors to the Otago Peninsula to explore the rocky shore inter-tidal zone, an interactive application for high school students to learn skills required to confront and solve their problems in everyday life, and an athlete monitoring application which would create useful statistics about the location of sports players in real time.
“Technology skills, talent and a great infrastructure will allow Dunedin and New Zealand to compete at global scale. I love what I see out of the BIT degree program, especially the talent and the skills they are acquiring,” says David Quinn from Audacious in Dunedin; an organisation that encourages and supports student entrepreneurs.
“My only concern is we are not producing more students out of this programme. They are a big part of our economic future,” said Quinn.
Associate Professor at the School of Information Technology, Samuel Mann, decided to pilot the event this year in a bid to create a pressure-cooker environment for the students, due to graduate at the end of 2012.
“We know the students have the technical smarts, but it’s important they know how to solve real business problems and have an understanding about what the business need is. By the end of the year they will not only have developed a program, but demonstrated that this has had a real impact. We look forward to seeing what comes to fruition by the end of the year,” says Dr. Mann.
Among the successes of the Bachelor of Information Technology programme, final-year students Rachel Saunders and Brenton Hall had their project picked up by technology company, Tracmap in 2011. The business has become one of the largest providers in GPS technology to the agriculture sector in New Zealand. The two graduates created a processing engine that maintains a repository of investigative calculations that can be applied across their data sets, tracking useful trends.
