Bizstartup.ie - NewsSolar-change project wins award in China

The Shanghai Expo attracted hundreds of thousands of people from across the world, focusing on the theme of ‘Better City, Better Life’.

The ‘SC Tree’ project was designed to enable slum inhabitants to become entrepreneurs by providing them with an ecological, technological and social business model that would make their environment more sustainable and a better place to live.

The students were awarded with a €3,600 cash prize, an all-expenses three-night stay in Shanghai (including access to the World Expo) and mentoring with representatives of leading international companies.

The competition received more than 300 projects from business school teams from around the globe.

Celebrating the news

“We all have different backgrounds and nationalities, share the affinity for entrepreneurship and saw this competition as a unique opportunity to combine our skills in order to create a sustainable venture for megacities. We enjoyed the process leading to our final business proposal very much because it was an outstanding chance to learn a lot about the challenges of megacities and to become creative in finding problems to solve these,” the team — Kai Hermsen, Tineke Franssen and Karel Vanacker — jointly said.

CEMS is a strategic alliance of 27 member schools from four continents and more than 50 corporate partners. The CEMS masters in international management programme, which is offered exclusively in Ireland at UCD Smurfit School, was ranked as the No 1 masters in management in the world by the Financial Times in 2009.

By Deirdre Nolan

Photo: Kai Hermsen, Tineke Franssen and Karel Vanacker

Article courtesy of Siliconrepublic.com