Young Okanagan entrepreneurs face off in iGen finals

Young entrepreneurs from Central Okanagan Public Schools put their business knowledge to the test Thursday at the Innovation Generation Challenge (iGen).

School District 23 hosts the iGen Challenge for grade 7 to 12 students that want to innovate and engage with entrepreneurship. Students gain access to mentors from local businesses to find solutions to real-world problems.

SD23 students are guided through a start-up process to create enterprises, find funding, build a network and make an impact in the innovation ecosystem in the Okanagan.

On Thursday, young entrepreneurs faced off in the 30^th year of the iGen finals.

“It’s a start-up business competition that allows SD23 students to basically go from ideation to essential sales,” said iGen lead Tyler Jensen.

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130 teams made up of a combined 400-plus high school students from across the Okanagan competed this year and only eight teams remain to compete for the grand prize.

“We’re giving away $8,000 in total prizes, and specifically $6,000 to the top three teams,” said Jensen.

These students are highly motivated to not only win the prize money for their developing business but to learn from the experience.

“Every day, we had to come up with five business ideas and throughout that, we came up with so many cool things, so many cool ideas every day from the whole class. Just seeing all those innovations, those ideas were pretty inspiring,” said student Tyson Caul.

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By the end of the evening, four teams of young entrepreneurs walked away with the prize money. Usually, there are only three winning teams, but judges added a fourth-place winner due to the high quality of the presentations.

First place, winning a prize of $3000 was the Multi-pliers made up of Tyson Caul and Jared Gregor. Second place to Creator Castle manned by Noah Garcia.

Third place was Ben Ramsey and Everett Boutcher who make up Paws & Play. The fourth-place team for the 2023 event was the Gutter Guys, Kylan Urban and David Ross.

Some of the winning students say that they’re leaving the iGen finals with new ideas and are already planning their next steps.

“Our next step is to work with lawyers, and this money will absolutely help with that so we can make sure we keep the rights to our product so that no one else can manufacture it,” said Caul.