The TU20 Cup is a two month business-tech case competition where students are given the opportunity to brainstorm and implement solutions for the betterment of our communities. This year’s theme was dedicated to building resilient communities, and was sponsored and supported by RBC, Geotab, and Silicon Halton. We were highly impressed by the caliber of participants this year, and can’t wait to work further with the winners to launch their businesses!
Upon receiving challenge statements from TU20, Geotab or RBC, students were matched with our amazing mentors to start their brainstorming process. Over 60 mentors volunteered to guide our teams this year, all of whom were highly experienced in the fields of business, technology, design-thinking, and community work. To better spotlight our mentors, we launched the “Meet the Mentors” program where we chatted with women in tech, Black mentors in tech and Indigenous entrepreneurs. Over the course of two months, our network of dedicated mentors helped teams streamline their products and pitches.
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“TU20 Cup is a great opportunity for mentors to give back and help the next generation of tech leaders accelerate their progress by sharing their own experience. I’ve been very impressed with the level of knowledge, skill, dedication, enthusiasm and team collaboration on the team that I got to mentor.” – Pavla Bobosikova “The Cup was a terrific experience, watching the young entrepreneurs work through challenges as a team and go from concept to developed business plan and demo in a matter of a few months and helping them along the way was super rewarding!” – Dino Tsalikis |
As students continued to work on their ideas, we hosted 4 workshops for the participants, all focusing around the know-how’s of design thinking, prototyping, conducting market research and building a technical product.
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“TU20 was a phenomenal experience to learn and apply both technical and business skills. The process of building a product from scratch with amazing team members and mentors was an extremely insightful and rewarding journey.” “The TU20 Cup was a one of a kind experience for me, as a high school student. The perfect balance within this competition between tech and business, prepared and impromptu, as well as the unique mentorship program allowed me to gain the knowledge and experience I lacked.” |
On the day of the competition, the business pitches presented by our participants covered an impressive variety of topics ranging from e-commerce solutions to financial literacy, environmental issues, and improving education. That afternoon, our judges were even more impressed by the breadth of technical solutions built by our teams, from websites to mobile applications both designed and coded.
Team Surplus’ app
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“Logistically, the TU20 Cup operated seamlessly, facilitating discussion time for the judges and making it a stress-free experience. Also, the quality of the pitches was shockingly high – I was very impressed by the effort and progress of all participants. I would participate again in a heartbeat :).” – Michael Bedarev “Judging the TU20 Cup was an absolute pleasure. The event was very well organized and the quality of the business pitches was quite impressive.” – Dan Irvine |
By the evening of March 7th, all 22 teams and over 120 participants had successfully completed the TU20 Cup Competition! The top 3 winners of the TU20 Cup 2021 are: Team Surplus, Team Aperio and Team Moomatic! The winner of the Top Tech Award is WOSSTERNLOO, Team Unify took home the Top Junior Award, and Team JERIG took home the Top Community Award.
The high-quality solutions we saw from all of the teams this year thoroughly blew away our mentors, judges and executive members! Congratulations to the winning teams and all the dedicated participants who worked incredibly hard this year.
A special thank you to our 60+ mentors, 30+ judges, and 6 guest speakers who worked so closely with our members to make the TU20 Cup experience as valuable as it was.
Keep up to date with our initiatives to see more groundbreaking ideas and solutions from the Tech Under Twenty community!