Congratulations to all semi-finalists for 'Reimagine Education Challenge'!

On July 27, Esperanza, a non-profit organization founded by John C. Tsang, former Financial Secretary of the HKSAR Government, hosted a Pitch & Learn Day as part of its Reimagine Education Challenge.

Entering the challenge with the belief that continuous collaboration is essential to changing the educational culture and contributing to the growth of eLearning, KEEP is keen on developing relationships with like-minded parties in both academic and commercial sectors as well as expanding the eLearning community to increase visibility and publicity for the latest eLearning technologies. 

Through the competition, Esperanza is hoping to find the best products, services and other learning experiences that address key learning challenges nowadays and to provide them with the support that will help strengthen their businesses. Judging based on the criteria of value proposition, business/operating model, the team, and potential impact, 4 finalists will be rewarded with a 3-month mentorship and matching programme, exposure through Esperanza’s network, a free exhibition booth at the Learning and Teaching Expo, along with other support from Esperanza's partners as well.

The event commenced with the Opening Remarks by John C. Tsang, where he mentioned how Esperanza serves as a collaborative platform and community for all individuals, businesses, institutions, universities, start-ups and non-profits to share perspectives and tackle challenges in education and learning. Through distributive leadership, he was certain that everyone could be a leader and play a part in creating changes.

Followed by the pitching sessions, 20 of 56 entrants with diverse focuses in education such as STEM, early childhood program, online education were selected to do a one-minute pitch on their solutions and products, covering their targeted customers, market size, unique value proposition, vision and impact, etc. After a brief Q&A session with the judges, all audience members also played a part in rating the entrants by voting on their phones in real-time.

While judges in deliberation, the event continued with a panel discussion between Diana Wu David (Former Financial Times Director), Ada Ng (Director of Corporate Affairs & Philanthropies at Microsoft), and Yat Siu (Co-Founder of the Dalton Learning Lab). Discussing the impact of education, David shared her belief that longevity is essential for experimentation and constant learning when it comes to solving problems in our world through education while Ng mentioned how we are being trained for jobs that have not been created yet as the most demanded skill sets are the ABC - Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, and the Cloud according to a recent research by Linkedin.

After the comments sharing from judges, the event concluded with the highly anticipated semi-finalists announcement. Let us all wish KEEP and other 9 semi-finalists the best of luck in the final interviews!

Complete list of semi-finalists

Startups

Non-profits