Global Entrepreneurship Week events

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MEDIA RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Auckland, New Zealand, Tuesday November 22nd 2011

Celebrating Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW), ecentre hosted a series of events throughout last week, highlighting the importance of encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship in both the student and wider community.

ecentre is Massey University’s business innovation centre, located on the Innovation Campus at Albany on Auckland’s North Shore.

On Tuesday ecentre held a business case challenge, where teams of University students had the opportunity to engage in the learning and critical thinking processes entrepreneurs have to use on a daily basis.

Forming the basis of the case was ecentre start-up company Hub9. Hub9 was founded by people who love the challenge, complexity and poetry of big data. According to IBM, 90% of the information available today, was generated in the last two years and hence the need to search vast amounts of data constantly increases. Hub9 makes light work of big data by giving people the tools that make sense of increasingly complex data and search requirements that unlock business opportunities, and solve business problems.

The students found the Hub9 case challenging but were able to grasp Hub9’s highly technical offering and gave polished presentations to the judging panel of Hub9 CEO Enrico de Klerk, ecentre Business Strategist Sabrina Nagel, and Chris Lock of Auckland Tourism, Events & Economic Development.

Enrico commented on the quality of the thinking from all participants and announced that the winning team, comprised of Corbin Neale, Ricktus Loke and Jonathan McDonald, won due to a better in depth understanding of the business.

All participants enjoyed the experience and were invited to work on other ecentre based businesses in the future. Students at Massey University have the opportunity to join the Massey League, a club which practices business case analysis and its members compete nationally and internationally with other university clubs.

Chris Lock, who is also involved in the Young Enterprise Challenge (YES) encouraged students to continue to get involved in competitions such as this to further their skills and build their networks.

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About GEW:

GEW is a global movement that encourages entrepreneurship and facilitates activities and events around entrepreneurship and innovation. This culminates in an annual one week celebration, New Zealand being the first country in the world to kick off the week. For more information about GEW visit: http://www.unleashingideas.org.nz/

About ecentre:

ecentre is the business innovation centre located at Massey University, Albany. ecentre specialise in helping people take their ideas from Garage to Global. ecentre’s vision is to help people with innovative ideas to create successful global companies. ecentre assists innovative businesses to grow the New Zealand economy through: customer knowledge and focus, inspired & strategic thinking, international networks and contacts, extensive business experience and Massey University innovation.