WHILE their competitors focused on tackling problems like poverty and pollution, they focused on an often-ignored issue - gaming addiction.

(From left) Jurong Junior College students Chibuzo Nwankpo, Shazwi Suwandi and Tan Ying Quan say students can enjoy video gaming in a healthy way. — Picture: CHOO CHWEE HUA

And that game plan won the trio from Jurong Junior College a gold medal at the Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship (Sage) World Cup competition last month.

They beat 11 other teams from six countries.

The team, consisting of JC 2 students Tan Ying Quan, 18, Chibuzo Nwankpo, 17, and Shazwi Suwandi, 18, also received the competition’s Boschee Award for the business venture that best integrates social and financial objectives.

They took home a trophy and a cash prize of US$2,000 ($2,700), which they are donating to the school.

The Sage World Cup, which was held in Nigeria this year, is a prestigious international competition for youth social entrepreneurship.

The JJC team’s solution to gaming addiction seems counter-intuitive - an e-gaming centre. It was set up in the school last year for the students to patronise after their lessons.

The centre was featured in The New Paper last year, when it was set up.

Sceptics may believe otherwise, but the team believes students can enjoy video gaming in a healthy way.

Said Ying Quan: ‘Many gaming centres are dark and rowdy, with many of the gamers using vulgarities.

‘But our centre is a conducive environment for gaming.’

The centre has 41 computer stations, and is brightly-lit and cosy.

The house rules of the e-gaming centre prohibit students from spewing vulgarities. They are allowed to play for only a maximum of three hours after school.

Students pay just $2 an hour to play games there.

And true to their cause, the students regularly organise talks on healthy gaming habits, and how to prevent gaming addiction.

At the Sage World Cup, held from 23-25 Jul, the students had to present their business model in front of an international panel of judges, as well as teams from Brazil, Ghana, Nigeria, South Korea, Tanzania and the US.

Ms Tiong Le Chin, the teacher-in-charge who accompanied the students on the trip, said she was amazed by the enthusiasm of the JJC team.

‘You can tell they actively tried to engage the audience. They were passionate about what they were doing, and they made the audience laugh,’ she recalled.

The team said that aside from their win, the highlight of the trip was meeting competitors from all over the world.

It was a happy homecoming, too, for Chibuzo, a Nigerian studying in Singapore.

He said: ‘I enjoyed the feeling of presenting our project in my own country. I felt like it made my fellow Nigerians look up to me in a way, because I have done well in Singapore.’

And for Shazwi, it was hearing the different experiences of other contestants which was most memorable.

‘It was quite an experience, because the way they study and do business is completely different from the way it is done here,’ he said.

The main difference, he said, was the great emphasis Singapore places on academic achievements.

‘There is a lot more support for youth entrepreneurship in other countries,’ he said.

To prepare for the competition, the team spent nearly four hours every day after school working on their presentation.

Recalled Ying Quan, who will be sitting for his A Levels this year: ‘It was tough. We’d see other people studying for their A Levels, but we didn’t really had much time to study.’

But the team has made a pact to study hard for the A Levels because they all hope to get places in overseas universities.

‘Who knows, we may make it to Stanford or Harvard,’ a beaming Ying Quan said.

By Anita Roddick (founder of Body Shop)

I never went to business school. I went to the business school of life. And I did so from an early age. I was brought up in an Italian immigrant family with a work ethic that teetered on the verge of slave labour. We got up each morning at five to make breakfast for the local fishermen in our café in Littlehampton and did not close until the last customer wandered home. The other cafés opened at nine and shut at five. This was a clue to me about what makes some people entrepreneurs and not others. Our café was owned by ferociously determined immigrants; the others were not. This is an important difference and the reason that I do not advise new entrepreneurs to submit themselves first to the rigours of an MBA is that business schools do not understand it. The conventional advice to budding entrepreneurs is that they should groom themselves to be the whizz-kid with a suit and a fascination for spreadsheets that bank-managers like. Actually, potential entrepreneurs are outsiders. They are people who imagine things as they might be, not as they are, and have the drive to change the world. Those are qualities that business schools do not teach. An MBA can give you useful skills that can be applied to a life in business. But they will not teach you the most crucial thing: how to be an entrepreneur. They might also sap what entrepreneurial flair you have as they force you into the template called an MBA pass.

I often get asked to talk about entrepreneurship - even by hallowed institutions such as Harvard and Stanford - but I am not at all convinced it is a subject you can teach. How do you teach obsession - because often it is obsession that drives an entrepreneur’s vision? How do you learn to be an outsider if you are not one already? In the business school model, entrepreneurs are most at home with a balance sheet, a cash-flow forecast and a business plan. They dream of profit forecasts and the day they can take the company public. These are just part of the toolbox of re-imagining the world: they are not the defining characteristics of entrepreneurship. The problem with business schools is that they are controlled by, and obsessed with, the status quo. They encourage you deeper into the world as it is. They transform you into a better example of corporate man. We need good administration and financial flair, after all, but we need people of imagination too. So here are 10 lessons that entrepreneurs need more than what they teach in business school.

1. Tell stories. The central tool for imagining the world differently and sharing that vision is not accountancy. It has more to do with the ability to tell a story. Telling stories emphasises what makes you and your company different. Business schools emphasise how to make you toe the line.

2. Concentrate on creativity. It is critical for any entrepreneur to maximise creativity and to build an atmosphere that encourages people to have ideas. That means open structures, so that accepted thinking can be challenged.

3. Be an opportunistic collector. When entrepreneurs walk down the street they have their antennae out, evaluating how what they see can relate back to what they are doing. It might be packaging, a word, a poem or something in a different business.

4. Measure the company according to fun and creativity. Business schools are obsessive about measurement. The result is vast departments of number-crunchers, but often little progress. What is most important in a company - or anything else - is unquantifiable.

5. Be different, but look safe. If you are different, you will stand out. But do not take risks with people who can make the difference between success and failure, especially if you are a woman trying to borrow money from the bank - which is how I came to be turned down for my original loan.

6. Be passionate about ideas. Entrepreneurs want to create a livelihood from an idea that has obsessed them; not necessarily a business, but a livelihood. When accumulating money drives out the ideas and the anger behind them, you are no longer an entrepreneur.

7. Feed your sense of outrage. Discontentment drives you to want to do something about it. There is no point in finding a new vision if you are not angry enough to want it to happen.

8. Make the most of the female element. Companies as we know them were created by men for men, often influenced by the military model, on complicated and hierarchical lines and are both dominated by authoritarian principles and resistant to change. By setting up their own businesses, women can challenge these models and will be welcomed by customers for doing so.

9. Believe in yourself and your intuition. There is a fine line between entrepreneurship and insanity. Crazy people see and feel things that others do not. But you have to believe that everything is possible. If you believe it, those around you will believe it too.

10. Have self-knowledge. You do not need to know how to do everything, but you must be honest enough with yourself to know what you cannot provide yourself.

Enough about thinking that you can succeed just by going through MoneyTree courses… yes it equips you with the financial knowledge you need, but to go further, it’s all you baby…

Do you really have an edge over our peers? Do you really have what it takes to be better?

Are you well equipped to safely call yourself an entrepreneur? Well I’m sure I’m not an entrepreneur yet.

Entrepreneur is so wildly used today, that I don’t even see the uniqueness of the word that I saw years ago. You will be an entrepeneur once you talk right, think right and do things right. If you’re neither one, don’t bother calling yourself one because you got much to learn kiddy.

Why am I so anal today? Well I did talk to a well-respected guy called Nicholas Chan just now, and being a man of substance, he clearly showed my core weaknesses, hit it straight and hard and showed me who I really was. I seriously thank him for people like this are those who will build you and shape you and not just sit back and agree to you and say what you want them to say. I think some of us here are guilty of this.

I want to startup a web2.0 company. Why? Because I’m so fond of it. The technology, the competitiveness, the never-ending hype and most of all, the vastness of innovation in the online world. I’ve read up many sites from the day I fell in love with it, from blogs to forums, from social networks to massive search engines. Sites like forbes, mashable, all played a part. Is this enough? NO. With a startup that is technology based comes a team that has to have the right members. Currently, I lack a Chief Technical Officer (CTO) that should know the core of my startup to enable it to run and scale up to be a business. I realised I’ve made some mistakes in my journey that has come about from emotions.

Like, jumping straight without thinking the consequences, having emotions affect my decisions and also being blind to the fact that I’m not that experienced yet. I’ve read up on a site that your team will eventually make or break the startup or business. Don’t hire (or partner with) your friends (for friendship sake):

Make sure there’s a major fit to the task or vision, otherwise you put a friendship on the line - and that can only go one of two ways. I have a friend that to this day is hurt because I didn’t ask him to join a company I started. Truth was, we had a good chemistry friendship, but that didn’t qualify for a good chemistry business venture. I’m just glad to still have the friendship.

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I’m now following core values from a site that Nicholas Chan is associated with.

K- Knowledge

Knowledge is King. You need to be well equipped with the necessary know-how in your area of expertise and in your field of work. Augmented with basic knowledge in out-of-school issues like starting up a business, obtaining financing, understanding industrial lingo; all these are addressed within Project:Senso. Knowledge is provided via articles, knowledge base and the ever vibrant forum discussions in our online portal.

“If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” – Newton

E- Exposure

Through talks, seminars and events held and organized by our partners, our users are able to be exposed to new ideas and concepts previously unattainable via the school system, enabling them with the opportunities and spark to think out of the box, to begin to challenge the norm, to rethink self-imposed limitations set by self, family and society.

E- Experience

Experience is gained by offering to users the opportunity to experiment, to take their ideas on the road. Project:Senso want members to find their own experiences and share among one another to make it more valuable. It is only with their guidance and their foresight that will enable better success for budding entrepreneurs.

N- Network

Networking is the most important factor in any successful person’s life. No matter if you are a start up or a financial markets trader. Project:Senso acts as a peer-support network for Entrepreneurs and Financial aspirants by primarily providing an online supporting role to help and facilitate the flow of information, opportunities and contacts while our alliances partners would be working with us for offline networking through our combined network of businessmen and financiers around the world from various industries.

If you think you’re ready, think again.

What you think?

It’s me and Joseph and Ying Quan you’re talking about… Haha… I love Life…

The journey so far was great. The sponsored flight to Nigeria, transiting at Amsterdam, the friends we made from USA, Brasil, South Korea were all great. We didn’t know we could find ourselves head to head with some darn witty students. These students, btw, from South Korea are on their way to the Ivy League. Well if you didn’t know already, Ive League consists of universities like Harvard and Stanford.

We won Gold in being the best social enterprise because we were able to set up a business that makes money out of a social cause. Seriously, not many can do that. However, we got top 4 and made it into the finals. Haha, Yep, Singapore, our first year here, getting to finals, heading on with countries that were in here for 6 years… Haha… BIG DEAL DUH!!!

I can safely say that this journey is nothing but pure babylon goodness. The people we meet, the environment we are in, are all so much different in Singapore. Makes me wanna study in the US when i get out of the national service. Haha… This I will tell you in the few posts to come.

Pictures will be uploaded into the gallery. ( This is great!!! )

Yeah.. just like Shazwi has said, passion will take you wherever you want to go. And the journey is everlasting to everlasting.

We are in Abuja, Nigeria right now, in the preliminary stages of this wonderful adventure. From a long trip (over 20 hours OMG…) we are finally settled in one of the hotels. 9 other countries are also here, the likes of Brazil, USA, Zambia, S.Korea, etc. We’ve toured the city a little, seen some of their cultures, smelt the air, stepped on the soil, and socialized with the friendly people. The food here is different (duh..) but not as diverse as that in Singapore.

Ok, enough of the boring background stuff, back to the first point. Passion has really brought us here and has made it possible for us to meet some great people and great people to be. We’ve been privileged to communicate with as high as global business men from all over the world and as low as budding entrepreneurs like us.

The competition is about to kick off and we hope that our passion can lead us to the trophy…

Pictures are coming your way, so as for now…just keep dreaming and let your passion drive you all the way…and lead you to the moo-ney..