And the winners are….

Thirty kidpreneurs from across Australia have won the inaugural Kidpreneur Challenge, a national competition to unearth Australia’s youngest kidpreneurs, aged 9-12 years, it was announced today by leading social enterprise Club Kidpreneur Foundation.

The ten winning business teams from Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia won the judges overs with their niche product concepts including hygienic shopping trolley handle covers, durable bottle-cap fishing lures, and motivational quotes on rocks from well known rock artists.

These winning teams will head to Melbourne next month for a money-can’t- buy business experience, ‘the Kidpreneur-in-Residence Internship’ at Moose Headquarters. There they will spend the day with product engineers and marketing team exploring behind the scenes of Australia’s fourth largest toy company. Their schools will receive a HP Inc Sprout All-in-One Desktop computer, 3D Scanner and Printer, valued at $4,589.

For the past three months more than 2000 kidpreneurs nationally have participated in Club Kidpreneur’s ‘Kidpreneur Challenge’. Led by their school teachers, teams of three have built micro-businesses, sold products at a market, donated profits to charity, and pitched their idea to entrepreneurs. Collectively the kidpreneurs raised more than $100,000 for charity from their business adventures.

Founder, Patron and lead Judge, Creel Price said the competition was an opportunity for kids to experience business and showcase their creativity and entrepreneurial capacity.

“These Kidpreneurs-of-the-Year show great potential to think laterally to create products that address everyday consumer problems,” said Price.

“Many kids had to pivot during their business building, which demonstrated resilience – one of the key traits you need to have to survive in business. Our program is about providing the first taste of entrepreneurship, to expose kids under the age of 12 years to business language and concepts to get them started on their entrepreneurial journey.

Club Kidpreneur Foundation is Australia’s longest running entrepreneurship education program and has worked with 10,000 kids in 600 schools nationally, who have raised almost $500,000 for charity.

“Entrepreneurship is a skill you can learn and with practise fine-tune your ability. The Kidpreneur Challenge provides an opportunity for kids to experience their first taste of business and to learn critical skills like creativity, confidence, resilience, problem solving and financial literacy.

“We want every primary school child in the country to have experienced entrepreneurship before they go to high school so that seed of ‘maybe I can do this’ is planted. Building a culture of innovation and enterprise by nurturing talent early is helping Australia’s next generation create sustainable future career paths,” he said.

Kidpreneur Challenge 2016 Winners

Queensland

  • BFG, Robertson State School
  • JAC’S, Robertson State School
  • Rock ‘ina’ Box, Springbrook State School

South Australia 

  • BEEZ Trolley Handle Covers, Woodend Primary School
  • Scent from Heaven, Woodend Primary School

New South Wales 

  • Jeweltastic, Coopernook Public School
  • Cap Lures, Coopernook Public School
  • CLYM, Ben Venue Public School
  • Food King, Castle Cove Public School
  • Charli’s Cute Cups and Accessories, Loreto Normanhurst

See the winning teams.