The MYOB Digital Challenge is back for 2022 and MYOB is calling for young innovators from all corners of Australia an New Zealand to register and compete in this year’s challenge.
Now in its eighth year, the MYOB Digital Challenge – formerly known as the MYOB IT Challenge – is designed to support and foster the skills of emerging local tech talent and offers young people a unique opportunity to showcase their talents by developing technology-centric solutions to address real-life business needs and issues.
Taking place virtually, the MYOB Digital Challenge is coordinated in partnership with the University of Auckland Case Club and will see teams of two-to-four students develop functional prototypes of their idea. Each team will present their workable solution to a panel of judges and highlight how it can be implemented to address the business need or challenge, capturing everything from the use case, to commercial planning, to how they’d launch to market.
Registrations for this year’s MYOB Digital Challenge are open until 6th July 2022. Upon the release of this year’s case, teams will have one week to produce a video covering their proposed solution, along with a one-page executive summary to make their case. MYOB staff will provide mentoring and support to help students with their ideation and proposal.
Submissions will then be judged by a panel of MYOB executives and UACC representatives, with six teams (three from Australia and three from New Zealand) going through to the MYOB Digital Challenge Trans-Tasman Final on 4th August, with the winner being declared during the live event. Each of the finalists will have one-on-one mentoring with senior leaders at MYOB to help refine their solution before presenting to the final judges.
MYOB Chief Product and Technology Officer, Darren Smith, will return to the judging panel and is excited to see what innovations this year’s talented teams can come up with.
“As both Australia and New Zealand seek to become leading digital economies and as the role of technology in our lives continues to grow, recognising, developing and celebrating young people with an interest in technology, an entrepreneurial mindset and a knack for problem solving is more important than ever,” Mr Smith said.
“MYOB is proud to continually invest in nurturing up-and-coming talent and the MYOB Digital Challenge is a fantastic one-of-a-kind opportunity for university students to test their abilities in practical, real-world scenarios and learn from some of the best in the business,” he added.
Since it launched in 2015, more than 1,500 students have entered to participate in the Challenge. Last year’s competition alone saw more than 270 students from 140 teams register to compete for a chance to win a share of the prize pool.
This year, there is a total prize pool of $8,500 up for grabs and to help them with their proposals, participants will be offered mentoring sessions over Zoom, as well as a chance to get some tips and tricks from previous contestants.
2021’s competition winners, hailing from the University of Auckland, were a team of students studying conjoint engineering degrees. Nicholas Kondal, Laith Saeed, Sonia Wang and Emily Zou, worked together to develop Rev-you – a functional prototype app for the MYOB marketplace designed to help SMEs automatically collect and analyse customer feedback using data analytics and artificial intelligence.
Team member, Nicholas Kondal, explains that each team member took something away from the Challenge and winning the competition last year gave them all confidence to pursue their career aspirations in the tech sector.
“Having a panel of industry leaders judge and recognise our idea, implementation, and presentation, is a great confidence boost and a source of motivation for us,” said Mr Kondal.
“Each team member has taken something away from this experience, and the analytical mindset of always considering the end-user is bound to help us in any problem-solving scenario in the future, no matter where we end up.”
Registrations for the 2022 MYOB Digital Challenge are now open to students from universities across New Zealand and Australia. F
