Established in 2017 by two seniors at Beijing City International School (BCIS), Avenir is a business competition designed to encourage high school students worldwide to develop pioneering business plans. The competition aims to enhance the participants’ skills in entrepreneurship, social enterprise thinking, positive networking, and receiving critical feedback from business professionals.

Avenir takes secondary school students’ ideas to the next level by fostering an innovative mindset and offering numerous prizes and resources. The experience of competing in Avenir requires participants to be collaborative and do extensive market research in industries, practice and enhance public speaking skills, and build confidence in presenting arguments as a group. Students participate in this program and develop ideas to address demanding challenges. The event aims towards envisioning future businesses that work for the good of all and the sustainable development of the world.

Theme: Pioneer

This year, Avenir is encouraging you to think outside the box and pitch your innovative and unique ideas to the business leaders and win a start-up fund for your own business. Don’t worry – this is not rocket science! Whether starting from scratch or making improvements on existing products, you can be a pioneer by creating novel, positive impacts on others!

You may want to make your project relevant to the near future.

For example, in our the post-pandemic life (this is not a requirement), people will be more cautious with personal hygiene. Thus, the prevailing public drinking fountain might not be as favored as before. Is it possible for the entrepreneurs to improve the drinking fountains so that they will not be wasted?

Timeline:

• • Registration and submission open: December 2021- April 2022
  • Workshop & Advice: Starting from March or April 2022 (TBD)
  • Competition: May 21 and 22, 2022

Cost of entry per person:

• • RMB 279 for Early Bird (before Mar 15^, 2022)
  • RMB 359 for Regular Registration (deadline before Apr 30, 2022)

*6 percent additional charge if you need a fapiao.

Registration is open now for any teams that wish to register for Avenir 2022 and confirmation of your participation in the competition will be sent once we have reviewed your Registration Survey filled out in the link below:

https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?i…

Or please scan the QR code:

Rules:

Each Avenir submission and presentation represents an original work that has been created by a team of two-four high school students from Grades 8-12. There is no limit to the number of teams that can enter the competition from the same school.

Two Divisions:

Junior division: Grade 8-9
Senior division: Grade 10-12

Team members have the authority to submit/present their original work by virtue of their ownership of the content (or the expressed permission of any non-participating content owners).

The submission/presentation does not disclose any third-party intellectual property or violate any existing copyright protections.

The Avenir leadership team maintains sole discretion to interpret, modify or eliminate any of the competition’s rules, terms, and conditions at any time and without notice. That said, the primary purpose of the Avenir rules, terms, and conditions is to provide equality of opportunity while also promoting a positive and impactful learning experience for all participants.

If you are interested in participating in Avenir 2022, either as a sponsor, speaker, mentor, or judge, please email us at avenir@bcis.cn & erica.wang@bcis.cn.

Follow Avenir on WeChat @AvenirEducation and @avenirbcis on Instagram for further notices!

Questions? Email us at avenir@bcis.cn.

Images courtesy of Avenir

“Mom, Dad, I’m bored!” is a familiar cry for many a parent. But what happens if we simply allow them to be bored? Apparently, they’ll can get up to something good like starting their own business!

Recently, Alessia Chizzoniti’s three kids had almost an entire month of vacation while other schools turned to online learning. With so much time on their hands, they started taking more of an interest in helping around the house, including the kitchen. Mind you, the kids are already used to cooking with their parents. But one day while the family was making their famous Grandma’s Tiramisu to bring over to some friends, the eldest, 9.5-year-old Giosu, suggested that the kids make their own tiramisu, “…and sell it!” chipped in 8-year-old Zeno.

Thus, Triomisu was born! The three children put their skills together and made 10 cups of the coffee-infused dessert for neighbors in their residential compound, charging RMB 15 per cup. Their mother resisted the strong urge to follow her youngest, 6-year-old Corinna, as she walked door-to-door hand-delivering the tasty treats. But she didn’t have to – the neighbors texted Chizzoniti and told her that Corinna was being safe, and completely adorable as she put on her doe-eyed face with a smile to make the deliveries. Chizzoniti could hardly believe it. “She’s normally so stoic, but now she’s putting on this super cute expression for the neighbors and charming them!”

The kids all share the responsibilities of the enterprise – Giosu takes the orders, Zeno’s “great at marketing,” and Corinna is “super precise in assembling the tiramisu in the cups.” Since launching their business but a few short weeks ago, they’ve even made upgrades like changing to more “professional” cups, which means they’ll be redoing the budget again!

When asked about their favorite part of the venture, Giosu explains, “That [we]can give people a really good tiramisu, which we exchange for money!” He also said that he’s learning “how to manage money” from this whole process. So far, the trio have put all their profits in a big recycled yogurt container, which serves as their bank for now.

Chizzoniti also reveals that “They have big plans of traveling the world and buying instruments for their band (yes, they also have a band).” Seems there’s never a dull moment in the Chizzoniti household, and there won’t be as long as the parents continue to leave the kids to their own devices and trust them to put their time to good use!

KEEP READING: Is This Teen Entrepreneur The Next Cartier?

Images: Courtesy of Alesha Chizzonitti 

“How long is it going to take?” ponders ninth-grader Tobias, who is huddled around a laptop with his two project teammates. “What if they want a really complicated design?”

They had the problem. How to guarantee business efficiency and customer satisfaction at the same time? The solution was much harder to identify. For several weeks, the Dulwich College Beijing (DCB) students inched toward the answer. By mid-October, they had one: a template was the only way to design custom-made USBs on demand. So the team created one, using a 3D printer. From there they were free to crank out dozens more USBs — holiday-themed, monogrammed, you name it. And with that, their startup concept, The Handy Dandies, was that much closer to living up to its name.

These business projects are somewhat hypothetical, but every step is a rigorous education in reality beyond graduation. Sometimes, these semester-long collaborative ventures result in actual businesses outside the classroom. But this enterprise approach to education emphasizes perseverance over profit. And ideas are incubated and hatched within Dulwich’s studio-lab curriculum known as SE21 — shorthand for STEM and Enterprise Skills for the 21st Century (also conveniently, DCB founding school Dulwich College sits in Southeast London, in the SE21 postcode). Now in its second year, SE21 offers students a more enterprise-driven approach to learning science, technology, engineering, and math.

Enterprise Education underpins a model of teaching and learning based on engaging in projects, collaboration, creating value, and solving problems. It means developing an ability to invent opportunities.

Dulwich students dress the part; they wear dark-blue suits and red neckties.  Divided into groups of three, each teammate morphs into a digital designer, a coder, or a marketing expert. Collectively, they collaborate: the teens come up with an idea, develop a business plan, pitch to an investor (the school), even forecast a profit margin, all on a tight deadline. The tasks are enough to make professionals twice their age reach for the nearest fidget spinner — which, by the way, the students also happen to design and make in the shop. Sometimes, though, the spinners just don’t spin. And that’s O.K.

“In our classrooms, we encourage failure,” says STEM teacher Yosef Karasik, as he tests a fidget spinner fresh from a 3D printer. “Failure is a skill. At the end of the day, we want self-regulated learners. And one big aspect of self-regulation is self-evaluation and self-reflection.”

For two years now, that introspective, enterprising spirit has been nurtured inside a sleek, brightly-lit space on Dulwich’s sprawling campus. SE21’s creators think of it as a “mindset,” and indeed it is something of an intellectual playground: humming 3D printers, rows of mobile workstations, a student-assembled Formula One car track running the length of a studio wall. Prior to SE21’s arrival at Dulwich, Karasik says, “innovation existed in a different form here. Now, it’s explicit.”

“We were questioning how much value design was adding to our curriculum,” says Natalie Stevens, Dulwich’s Head of Technology. “Were our students taking away what they needed to? Were they gaining the skills they needed to become engineers, designers, or architects? The answer was not always, so we had to change the focus.”

The question then became: How should SE21 & Technology better prepare students to enter the world’s top universities?

Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama pushed to expand student access to STEM education, and estimated that the US workforce would need 1 million more STEM graduates by 2022. In China, that need is far greater and much more immediate.

A recent Peking University study of Chinese colleges and universities reported a low career survival rate for graduates who studied entrepreneurship. And the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor noted that China has one of the world’s highest fear-of-failure rates, which prevents many graduates from ever attempting to get their vision off the ground.

“I think there’s a real disconnect between Chinese education and the realities of where you’re going to go when you graduate,” says Julian Fisher, who two years ago co-founded Venture Education, an Enterprise Education curriculum now taught in 25 Beijing schools. “I think a lot of students have never realized what’s it like to be completely at the bottom.”

This downward trend in post-graduation attitudes toward success reflects the paramount importance of a curriculum like the one used within SE21, where students gain not only technical skills but also what teachers call “soft skills” essential to making it in the real world: teamwork combined with critical thinking and communications skills.

Fisher, who also chairs the Education Forum for the British Chamber of Commerce in China, acknowledges that the concept of Enterprise Education may appear to contradict the success stories of billionaire entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and the late Steve Jobs.

But there’s a major difference between Enterprise Education and Entrepreneurship Education, Fisher argues: the former is about the mindset, the latter is often only about venture creation and money. “One of the weaknesses of the entrepreneurial ecosystem is that notion of, ‘I just need a great idea, and then I’ll get funding, and then I’ll get rich,’” he says.

Instead, Fisher points out, consider the 13-year-old boy from the UK who made a nuclear fusion reactor. Or the 13-year-old Mongolian girl who hunts with eagles. “These are not kids making money,” he says. “The point is they are having an impact.”

At their core, Enterprise Education curriculums like SE21 prioritize the inculcation of the value of the design process, fostering confidence, making ideas happen, and figuring out how those concepts will help people. Rather than consulting a textbook on how to run a business, improve a societal ill, or make the general population happier, students are pushed to rely less on classroom instruction and more on group instinct and judgment in order to see a project through.

Some SE21 students are as young as 13, and many already talk like techies. Buzzwords suited to Silicon Valley — “beta phase,” “bigger vision,” “mockup business experience” — roll off the tongue. At the center of SE21 sits what is currently known as the War Room, where project strategies detailing Dulwich’s upcoming Enterprise Fair are scrawled in pen on the glass walls. “We don’t always come to the best solution first,” admits Jadelle, a tenth-grader in her second year of SE21.

Jonathan, one of the program’s youngest students, understands Jadelle’s observation all too well. Every day during lunch hour, he drops by one of SE21’s makerspace rooms to inspect a pet project he enjoys tinkering with. He realizes a mistake the moment he removes two neon-green plastic pieces from the 3D-printer.

“I’m gonna need to design some more parts for this marble run,” Jonathan says with a slight grin. “They don’t fit together.”

“They almost fit together,” offers his STEM teacher, Andrew Walton. “Just a smidgen more tolerance, and they would fit.”

One aspect of learning from failure comes from breaking down an idea’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats — and then just going for it. Jonathan does not appear frustrated; in fact, his miscalculation illuminates something bigger. And he says he’s now better prepared to take another shot at improving the intricacies of track design.

In class, SE21 students consult a system to help guide them through the many stages of an idea: empathizing (understanding a client’s need); ideating (brainstorming); prototyping (creating something); testing; and, finally, reflecting. Students are told they might fail at any point. But this sort of structure keeps them honest with themselves, encourages them to research further, and gives them the confidence to start all over again.

During our visit to SE21 on a Friday afternoon, there was a remarkable lack of visible stress inside the classrooms. With so much at stake, with so much time and work invested in an idea that could fall apart at any time, the students manage to hold it all together.

“Their understanding of business, it’s already there,” says business teacher Li Jian Newman. “What makes it such a pleasure to teach students like these is they’re just so willing to get involved, to think about things differently, to really think about the world from a different perspective.”

Take the group tasked with creating the artwork for a brochure advertisement. Their big idea: Merchiful, a solution to improving the complicated world of gift-giving. Say your aunt knows you’re a fan of K-pop music. But that’s all she knows, and she has no clue where to begin shopping. Instead of frantically searching Taobao for the perfect gift, Merchiful will curate and creatively package a K-pop box set for her.

“It’s kind of ambitious,” admits Cathy, Merchiful’s marketing captain, whose command of an elevator pitch would be the envy of most adults. “We asked for the most funding out of all of the groups.” Students apply for up to RMB 750 from the STEM program to start a business. Any funds raised above the amount of the loan are reinvested into STEM projects or donated to charitable causes.

Once the teachers approve a project idea, the students spend eight weeks developing it. Along the way, they manage orders, manufacturing, sales, and product distribution. One student group is working on how to effectively market the upcycling of discarded wine bottle corks into miniature, magnetic plant pots. “It’s not exactly our concept,” one teammate says. “But we’re gonna make it ours. We’re trying to think more of the aesthetic factor.”

Down the hall during lunch hour, students staff and stock the school’s student-run shop, called the Friends Shop, with supplies and healthy snacks. Sixteen-year-old William manages it with a team of classmates and says he rarely encounters a smooth week. “One little mistake, one little communication error may result in a day without sufficient student shifts” he says.

William decided to take things up a notch in the name of health after he contacted a startup in Shenzhen. His idea was to rent the company’s vending machines to replace the school’s food dispensing machines. The shop has since served as William’s portal into the risks and challenges associated with running a business, warts and all. “The biggest thing that textbooks can never teach you is the logistical and organizational issues,” he says. “Learning, I don’t think, has to be confined to traditional academia. Collaboration and empowerment are everything.”

Asked about the value of enterprise education versus entrepreneurship education, William says students “should be careful of” aspiring to be the next Jeff Bezos of Amazon, for example. “I think we should develop our own unique way of doing things,” he says, “instead of trying to become someone else.”

“It’s finding a new way to challenge yourself,” adds tenth-grader Tiare. “That doesn’t mean it just has to be with a textbook; it can be creative as well.”    

SE21 hosts the Technology department which every student takes in sixth to eighth grade and then optional from ninth to twelfth grade. SE21 is a hive of activity throughout the day. The space encompasses a swarm of lessons and extracurriculars, exams, and clubs. But it is the enterprise philosophy learned here that shapes and pushes young minds toward graduation and beyond. It’s where students discover that enterprise is less about making money for themselves and more about creating value for other people. It’s a mindset where playing it safe often inhibits progress, and where failure is often the only sure path to success.

“Dulwich provides us with a degree of freedom,” says Mark, a tenth-grader. “We aren’t forced into anything. Rather, the gates are open for us to enter the real world.”

This article appeared in the beijingkids November 2018 Beijing Makers issue
Photos: Courtesy of Dulwich College Beijing and Julian Fisher

Since our magazine first hit the Beijing streets some 11 years ago, we’ve met a lot of enterprising people who took a chance and seized the many opportunities in this city, which might not have been available to them in their home countries.

Such a person is Dominic Johnson-Hill, the founder of Plastered 8, perhaps Beijing’s most iconic pop-up t-shirt brand.

His clever reinterpretations have made the city’s hackneyed imagery fashionable, in the form of funky t-shirts. Five years after Johnson-Hill last graced our pages (in our Talking Shop column), he’s back, this time not to talk about the continued success of his Plastered brand, but to help jump-start the careers of budding student entrepreneurs from Canadian International School of Beijing (CISB).

Henry, 16: What do you do when you face economic challenges
Dominic: A lot of people who come to China and do business lose their moral compass. I believe you should be strong on that side and never lose your values. If I face an economic challenge, my number one thing would be to try to be even stronger or more aggressive on marketing, and get even more people to talk about the brand. A lot of companies that encounter economic challenges cut back on marketing first because they see it as unnecessary or non-essential. Of course, I would evaluate the cost of the product and try to bring it down as much as possible.

Samuel, 16: What’s your biggest challenge so far?
Dominic: It’s understanding myself as an entrepreneur: I started to grow beyond what I wanted, I started to lose a lot of money and became very unhappy. I think that the mindset of many entrepreneurs is all about growth, or what they like to call “scale”. But I realized it’s somebody else’s dream and not mine. As my business became well known, I started to expand beyond what I originally wanted, so I had opened more stores in Beijing and Shanghai. One day I stopped myself and said, “What am I doing?” and then closed down all of those different businesses and brought them just back to Beijing. I realized that the reason that I got into Plastered is because I want to have fun and create things.

Bryan, 16: How did you learn about business, considering that you dropped out of school?
Dominic: I picked it up by doing it. I’m not proud of dropping out of school, but it’s just that school wasn’t for me. Where I went to study in England was traditional, and it wasn’t like it is now. It didn’t fit me; I was very much outside of the mainstream of learning: I was dyslexic and had ADHD and so I dropped out. But when I started traveling on my own, I learned to stand on my two feet and realized I could pick up languages and skills quite quickly if I just got my hands dirty. And so I found business a natural step for me and quite enjoyed it. I found that business is about building relationships. If you guys learn business, there’s no reason you can’t start businesses even at your age now.

Joanna, 16: You said you traveled around the world, so where did you get your money from?
Dominic: The first job I got in England to make money, I made GBP 800 working in a donkey sanctuary – of all places, I looked after donkeys! I got other jobs in Zimbabwe, Bolivia, and India. When I arrived in China in 1993, there were only two bars in Beijing and then you’d find yourself sitting next to the COO of Boeing at that bar, and I was like, “Hey, what do you do?” He said, “I’m the COO of Boeing,” and I responded, “Cool! Can you give me a job?” Eventually, I would be teaching his personal assistant English. So basically, I just did jobs and I started my first business in 1995. So it’s just meeting people, relationships, being a good person, and whatever job I did, I did it better that you would ever imagine.

Britt, 17: What’s the best way to attract people when you do online business?
Dominic: Do something incredible. First of all, I like the product to be able to speak for itself as well. I create a product that I hope would spark a conversation. A lot of people make average products and spend millions trying to get people to buy them. I’ve made products that have gone viral because they’re ridiculous. Of course, on social media you’re trying to create conversations out of your products. There are many ways, of course, to drive traffic to a website. But be consistent, be original, be creative, have fun – that’s what I’m trying to do.

Arman, 16: How do you drive people to buy your products?
Dominic: If your place isn’t popular but you want people getting in there, then put your business online. If it’s a restaurant where you need people to get in the door, it’ll be down to, first of all, having an incredible product. Why not spend the majority of your money, in the beginning, making your food incredible? Because that is what will bring people to what you might call a footloose business or a business where you’re out in the middle of nowhere but people come to you anyway.

Kevin, 16: What are the advantages of running a small business? How about the risks?
Dominic: The advantage for small businesses is they’re a small boat and they can move fast and change direction, and for big businesses, this takes a long time. I’m in a creative business so I have to be creative. And to do that, you have to be prepared to fail. You have to be in the mindset that it’s more likely that you’re going to fail. You can’t look for some kind of security that if you’re constantly analyzing your customers and always thinking, “I only want to deliver stuff that they want,” then eventually I’ll lose my brand. I have to take a risk and excite people with new things so I can keep my market alive. But when you’re peaking, that’s when you need to restart and take high-risk chances all the time to be able to create new markets.

This article appeared in the beijingkids November 2018 Beijing Makers issue
Photos: Uni You

Many parents, if they saw their teenage offspring playing with model figures, might tell them to grow up and stop wasting their time. But one Beijing student has turned his hobby into a lucrative sideline. We asked Liu Chong, whose English name is Peter, to tell us more.

“When I was a little kid,” he said, “one day I was walking in a mall and I saw the name of a store: ‘Warhammer’. I went inside the store. The fantasy miniatures were so wonderful: the knights with heavy armor, the swordsmen battling against evil, the space marines using plasma guns to fight aliens… and people were using those miniatures, with all their delicate details, to fight battles on tabletops. I started falling in love with that world.”

Warhammer was developed by British company Games Workshop, and has spawned novels, comics, and video games exploring its fantasy and sci-fi universes. However, the core of it is a war game played with miniature figures. And for many enthusiasts, including Peter, the real fascination is collecting and painting the “minis”.

“I enjoy painting,” he told us, “but I don’t play the game a lot.”

But even painting is a social activity, not a solitary one.

“We have a club for painting minis,” Peter said. “We meet in a store which sells the models but is also a club. We have a table there to paint and play. People help each other because most people are painting models to play with. Also, we communicate in a WeChat group – my painting friends are from so many cities! There are painters all over the world.”

If you have never heard of Warhammer, you might be surprised to learn what a vast global business it is. Games Workshop have over 460 stores around the globe, and the company was recently valued at one billion US dollars. While there are cheap starter sets, providing basic armies of plastic figures, the most expensive single figure, which rejoices in the name of Archaon Everchosen, Exalted Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse, retails at USD 140. Rare, out-of-production minis can change hands for thousands of dollars.

But what can be a very expensive hobby is also a money-making opportunity, for entrepreneurially-minded youngsters like Peter. As the figures are sold unpainted and usually need to be assembled from many tiny parts, those who just want to get on and play the game are happy to pay others to do the work for them. So Peter buys figures, paints them, and sells on them on via Taobao.

“If I buy a mini for RMB 400, when I’ve finished painting I’ll sell it for RMB 750 or 800. But if it’s hard to do, maybe it will be RMB 1000.

“My price is lower than other model painters because my painting skill is not really very good!” he adds modestly. Readers can judge for themselves from the pictures whether his diffidence is justified, but a quick search on Taobao revealed that figures can indeed sell for up to RMB 10,000.

“Sometimes I have orders from customers,” Peter told us, “but sometimes I just sell my own ideas.”

We asked what he does with the money he makes.

“I save it, and I can buy anything I like,” he said. “I’m also building my own army of minis, and I will not sell them.”

For Peter though, painting models remains primarily a labor of love.

“I like any kind of way to show my thoughts about art. Painting miniatures is what I’m working on now, but I also like to practice my singing and guitar.

“It can show the world you have creativity in your heart.”

This article appeared in the beijingkids November 2018 Beijing Makers issue
Photos: Courtesy of Liu Chong