I am excited to announce that we have launched in Hong Kong! Two years ago we started our Spike Coaching exclusively for high schoolers in Taiwan, but it quickly became clear that our service was valuable to students all over the world. Hong Kong makes the most sense as the next region for us to work in because of its geographic proximity to Taiwan, its very international demographic and of course the cultural and linguistic similarities to Taiwan. Also we found that families in Hong Kong already have a voracious appetite for high quality programs that develop kids’ innovation and entrepreneurship skills. In fact, we’ve found that these families demand innovation education programming more than any other region in the world except the Bay Area/Silicon Valley.
Our first step last month was to do market research and then take a preliminary trip to Hong Kong to get to know the market better and meet with local families, school leaders and other education thought leaders. Like Taiwan two years ago, the reception we received was extremely open and encouraging. Very respected private, international schools like the Harbor School, English Schools Foundation and Stamford American School made time to meet with us and the response was incredible; they immediately wanted to work together. Stay tuned for more information on the schools events we’ll be running for their students. For those who don’t know, we now offer free events for schools. (If you know a school that wants to us to run an event in Taiwan or Hong Kong, please send them this Event Portfolio deck and tell them to contact us if they’re interested.)
The pictures of the event below speak for themselves. The students in attendance were highly motivated and deeply engaged for the entire 5 hours. More important than the innovative ideas that they pitched, they developed some of the innovation abilities that they’ll need and be using for the rest of their life.
From now on, all our coaches will be traveling frequently to Hong Kong, and we thank you in advance for any introductions to school leaders, innovation/entrepreneurship programs and families there. We’re very excited to have launched our unique model of Spike Coaching in Hong Kong and to start working with the fabulous students and families throughout the region.
The pictures of the event below speak for themselves. The students in attendance were highly motivated and deeply engaged for the entire 5 hours. More important than the innovative ideas that they pitched, they developed some of the innovation abilities that they’ll need and be using for the rest of their life.
From now on, all our coaches will be traveling frequently to Hong Kong, and we thank you in advance for any introductions to school leaders, innovation/entrepreneurship programs and families there. We’re very excited to have launched our unique model of Spike Coaching in Hong Kong and to start working with the fabulous students and families throughout the region.
Most importantly we celebrated our Hong Kong launch by organizing our first big event there last weekend (4/14) — a Youth Entrepreneurship Event that we call Startup Saturday. As a new entity and since Hong Kong high schoolers are extremely busy, we weren’t sure if we’d get many students to attend this 5-hour, Saturday workshop. But the response was bigger than we’ve ever seen in any of our past Taiwan events! 45 students ended up signing up for a venue with capacity for only 25, so we had to establish a waitlist, and we’re going to do a follow up HK Entrepreneurship Workshop event soon (probably in May). Below are some of the pictures from the workshop, a crash course in design thinking where students develop solutions to real-world problems of their picking, iterate on their ideas, develop models and then pitch them to professional investors (thank you Justin Wong, Atin Batra and Christine Hung for volunteering your time and your invaluable feedback to the kids).
Here’s a clip from the winning student team, Sophia and Harsh, that pitched Safe Case, a tamper-proof, lockable pouch to keep cell phones temporarily away from students at schools and during important occasions when distractions are unproductive and unwelcome!
The pictures of the event below speak for themselves. The students in attendance were highly motivated and deeply engaged for the entire 5 hours. More important than the innovative ideas that they pitched, they developed some of the innovation abilities that they’ll need and be using for the rest of their life.
From now on, all our coaches will be traveling frequently to Hong Kong, and we thank you in advance for any introductions to school leaders, innovation/entrepreneurship programs and families there. We’re very excited to have launched our unique model of Spike Coaching in Hong Kong and to start working with the fabulous students and families throughout the region.
