The pathway to Microsoft's Imagine CupThe pathway to Microsoft's Imagine Cup

By Christopher Reyes
(Christopher Reyes is a former Marketing Management student, who graduated in June 2014 at Cphbusiness, and he was also Vice Minister in the student organisation’s Ministry of Business).

In the fall 2013 Timea Kiss (Minister of the Ministry of Business) and myself wanted to create an event that would be very enticing for students that would be beneficial for all programmes. So after the company visit at Microsoft that we had conducted in December Sara from Microsoft’s Marketing Department talked with Timea again and decided that Cphbusiness should have an entrepreneurial competition that would help students in IT and in Marketing. That’s where Microsoft’s Innovation Cup was established.

Innovation Cup 

Through the whole month event, students had to team up and create an app as well as develop a business model that would explain to the judges in the grand final how this particular app would make money towards the future.

The whole event gave students the opportunity to hear from some of the best entrepreneurs in Denmark and important figures in Microsoft that could give them a beneficial incentive on app development and business model structure.

I (Christopher Reyes) had the opportunity to partner with four of my fellow students: Jimmy Attila Szøløsi, Olena Mikhanosha, Andrei Neculaesei and
Adam Vongrej. In the beginning we brainstormed to come up with an app that would be good enough to win the competition and ultimately we decided on the app “Life Hunt”.

For the Grand Final four teams along with us had a whole day to structure our four-minute presentation and develop a pitch for the judges.

After a whole day of presentations and responses from the judges, Life Hunt ultimately won the competition and advanced into the national final called Imagine Cup.

Imagine Cup 

On the day of Imagine Cup, Team Life Hunt once again had the whole day to structure a presentation, but this time we needed to create a 10 minute presentation explaining about our app, the business model and what sort of benefits our app created for our customers, our environment, and for ourselves.

Once again there were four teams who made presentations. Including our team, Team Macaw was another representative for Cphbusiness. At the end of the event, Team Life Hunt won the national final in the gaming category. Team YuBeRu won in Innovation and they also won in the Overall Competition.
Team YuBeRu won in Innovation in the international final in Seattle.

Back to school

After we won the national finals, we decided to take a break for now and focus back on our schooling. We realized that before we make this into a legitimate business, we will need to be fully prepared for this.

These events have been very beneficial for many students at Cphbusiness and my team will be going for the big prize again at next year’s Imagine Cup.

Read more about Team Life Hunt here, and find out more about the results of the 2014 Imagine Cup final in Seattle here.