Event virtualization helps save student entrepreneurship competition from cancellation

Over the past school year, a group of high school students worked with mentors from Tampa Bay's business community in a program called Next Generation Technology.

These brilliant and innovative students, who are sure to be the future tech leaders and entrepreneurs of the world, identified real world problems and built their own solutions.

They were slated to pitch their ideas and prototypes in a competition which was nearing it's final stages in April and May.

COVID-19 made it unsafe to gather in-person, and the leaders in Pinellas Education Foundation and Pinellas County Schools started looking for solutions to move forward with the event.

These community leaders recognized an opportunity to teach the kids that succeeding in the world of business requires being adaptable to shifting market conditions and using tech in novel ways to solve real problems.

When speaking to Tampa Bay Inno's Lauren Coffey, the founder of Next Gen Tech, Robyn Mussler remarked, “These kids’ lives are being cancelled,” she said. “We owe it to them to be creative and show everyone these are hard times but in times of need, we can do this."

Robyn reached out to our co-founder Pooja Pendharkar, and over the last two weeks we worked together to virtualize this amazing community event.

The two teams worked closely to ensure operations went smoothly, dress rehearsals flowed well, and everyone was comfortable with the new format.

From the entire Lunchpool team, we want to thank you for trusting us to help make the event a huge success!

We are looking forward to hosting the awards ceremony in our virtual events hall on April 22, 2020. It's open to the public, so come join us in the virtual world!!

Shout out to the awesome 2019-20 NGT Judges

• Kyle Donovan - GTE Financial
• Brian Kornfeld - Synapse Florida
• Holly Markham - GTE Financial
• Tara Murphy - Achieva Credit Union
• Robyn Mussler - Connect-IT 360
• Brittany Phillips - Tech Data
• Lakshmi Shenoy - Embarc Collective Tampa Bay
• Mathew Thomas - Malwarebytes