“We all have talents, ideas and the ability to innovate. It’s never been easier to get started.”
– Michael Hayes, Add Jam Founder
Last night marked the launch of the inaugural RookieOven Academy as the home of Glasgow’s tech community welcomed a group of ambitious young people looking to further their abilities in digital.
The RookieOven Academy is for 16-18 year olds of Glasgow wanting to flex their entrepreneurial muscles and, over the next six weeks, participants will team up to develop a digital product/business concept from scratch.
Each weekly session will have a different theme and guest speaker; on this first night, participants heard all about ‘Creative Thinking’ from Add Jam cofounder Chris Sloey who shared his ideas process and the importance of embracing your interests/hobbies.
Future sessions will focus on things like ‘Business Models’ and ‘Digital Marketing’ in the lead up to the final night when participants have the opportunity to pitch their ideas to a panel of experts and investors Dragon’s Den-style.
Formative tasks and group exercises, alongside expert mentoring, help the participants get their creativity flowing, and the groups were able to come up with some amazing ideas even on this very first night together; litter-picking drones, study apps, tourist information apps and more. Following this initial ideas process, the participants have now formed three teams with three totally unique and exciting ideas that they will be pursuing going forward.
With the first, successful Academy session in the books, it will be exciting to see how these digital entrepreneurs of the future develop over the coming weeks.
