Summer entrepreneurship programme Summer Lab has formed the inspiration for the paper Entrepreneurship and Negotiation: Teaching Scientists to Negotiate Like Artists (and Vice-Versa), which examines the challenges and opportunities involved in teaching negotiation to aspiring entrepreneurs from diverse interests and backgrounds.

Cropsy Technologies are developing a combination of patent-pending hardware and AI to help growers make data-driven decisions. While their innovations have a number of applications, they are currently focused on viticulture, an industry that the team have identified as ripe for picking.

The NZ Hi-Tech Awards celebrate New Zealand’s most successful hi-tech companies and highest achieving individuals. University of Auckland alumni are well represented in the recently released 2021 finalists list, with alumni involved in every category.

Director Wendy Kerr led the Centre of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) from September 2015 – March 2021. Among her many achievements, she led the development and launch of Unleash Space, nearing her audacious goal of having 10% of all University of Auckland students engaging with innovation and entrepreneurship programmes.

CreateBase is on a mission to give the next generation the skills, tools and confidence necessary to unleash their inner technology creators, and realise their future potential. They are currently building a digital platform that teachers and parents can provide to children to teach tangible technical skills through play.

Eight University of Auckland academic staff have been recognised for their service to advancing entrepreneurial education at the University of Auckland through the inaugural Hynds Innovation Education Awards.

Ten year old Lilah McDonald was horrified to discover that only 5% of Auckland parks have drinking fountains and decided to do something about it. With the support and guidance of her mum, University of Auckland alumna and entrepreneur Kate O’Leary, she has started Water Us. The social venture sells stylish and environmentally-friendly toilet paper that will help fund water fountains for the community.

According to the United Nations Development Programme, students, scholars and researchers with disabilities remain under-represented in higher education and vulnerable to feeling marginalised and excluded on campuses. This can be for a number of reasons including difficulty accessing physical learning facilities. University of Auckland student Emma Cooper-Williams has experienced these challenges first hand.

“The nurses had no way of knowing if my nephew was improving or worsening.” Statements such as these have inspired the creation of Pacific Med Tech, a social venture that aims to support capacity building in biomedical engineering departments of hospitals in the Pacific.

A venture founded by University of Auckland engineering alumni Daniel Xu and Ming Cheuk is helping organisations improve their processes and customer experience by taking advantage of innovative technologies like machine learning, computer vision, and conversational AI.