by Nicole Pineda
October 25, 2021
AIESEC in University of the Philippines Diliman successfully held their event Blueprint: Startup the Future last September 3 and 10, 2021 with the objective of aiding the youth with an opportunity to pitch their business ideas integrating Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) to solve global issues.
Open to senior high school and college students, Blueprint is a startup innovation competition that supports and brings the youth's STI-related business propositions into reality.
Blueprint's 2-day event began with talks from DOST, QBO Innovation Hub, UPSCALE Innovation Hub on Day 1, together with the announcement of the top 6 finalists at the end. These finalists were then mentored by different business personalities to prepare them for their final pitch on Day 2.
With five definite contenders, Day 2 started off introducing the judges for the final pitches. The judges were Anne Sophie van der Spek from The Plastic Flamingo, Jan Willem Zwarteveen from Gamesa Renewable Energy, Emmanuel Bueta from OneWatt, Ken Ngo from Core PH Holdings, and RJ Ledesma from Mercato Centrale.
All in all, the teams who were able to participate in the event's Day 2 were Team HOMI, Innovateam, Oreo, Team Hehe, and Fighting Camelz.
Oreo, consisting of members Marnellie Maxine Ortiz, Erin Hannah Buenaventura, Audrey Joy Laciste, and Joselle Marie Reyes, were able to place as the 2nd runner-up of the competition. Their STI-related business proposition is entitled 'One Call Away,' an application that provides the patients or their family members quicker access to hospital services, primarily for emergency purposes. This proposal hopes to achieve an accessible, streamlined emergency system with absolute security to uphold data privacy regarding the patients' medical details.
Joshua Parenas of Innovateam presented his startup proposal named Finaas and has earned the 1st runner-up place in the competition. In his final pitch, Parenas emphasized various reasons that led to the youth's lack of enlightenment concerning financial matters. With this, Finaas is a stimulated story-driven application that is meant to encourage its players to maximize financial literacy approaches.
The competition concluded with the announcement of Team Hehe as Blueprint's champion. Nicole Anne Cobarrubias and Anndee Atendido's concept proposal is the Lingkod application. In order to help PWDs who have been facing challenges while looking for employment, Lingkod aims to become the premier job and school portal for PWDs in the Philippines. Their final pitch indicated that in order to achieve this, the application would be offering personalized opportunity-matching, a more straightforward application process with direct communication to recruiters, and networking platforms.
As part of the top 3 winners for the Blueprint competition, Oreo and Innovateam won an Xcellerator course of their own choice from Unionbank. The same prize is given to the event's champion, Team Hehe, together with a chance to be given a slot for the 11th batch of the UPSCALE Enterprise Program.
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