Championing the Dragon’s Den

This year's Victoria International Leadership Programme (VILP) culminated with a student-led digital disruption project held last Thursday night.

The Faculty of Architecture and Design hosted the final Dragons Den event at the Te Aro Campus where British High Commissioner his Excellency Jonathan Sinclair and Victoria’s Professor Miriam Lips and Professor Brad Jackson were the “dragons” or judges for the evening. 

Three student teams presented, pitched and defended their digital action campaigns with considerable passion and strong arguments. 

Food Fight's campaign aimed to create awareness around healthy food by creating online communities through Facebook, Pinterest and Wordpress. This was followed by Digital Youth's campaign, which focused on recommendations to parents of the new digital native generation about how digital devices can be used as a supplement rather than a substitute. The final campaign, #wheresmydata, cleverly wove some Facebook stalking of audience members into a campaign that looked at privacy issues in online data. 

The three groups then defended their campaigns against questioning from the dragons and the audience. 

The winning team of both the popular audience vote and the dragons vote was #wheresmydata. 

The judges recognised that all three teams had researched and delivered their campaigns, as well as organising the event, whilst maintaining their own studies. 

This VILP project involved both pan-university collaboration and global engagement with a diverse range of stakeholders taking part from the School of Design, the School of Government, the Development Studies programme, diplomatic missions, study abroad providers and exchange partners.