The Student Innovation Awards, hosted by the Innovation Hub, recognise University of Sydney students' innovative solutions to real-world challenges. Bachelor of Commerce student Vivian Yu shares her experience of the Student Innovation Awards, how her team, Christina Liu, David Young (Dalyell Scholar), James Macintyre and Apurva Shukla, created their startup idea WasteLess, and what led them to win the Planetary Impact Award.
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| Team members: Vivian Yu, Apurva Shukla, David Young, Christina Liu & James Macintyre |
What is WasteLess?
Wasteless is a solution to household food waste. In Australia, households surprisingly waste more food than agriculture and hospitality – a problem we’re determined to tackle. We aim to create a tool that helps people waste less food by finishing what’s at home.
To do this, WasteLess is an app that allows people to keep track of their groceries at home with smart expiry date approximations to remind you to finish your food on time.
How did you develop WasteLess?
My team including Christina Liu, David Young, Apurva Shukla, James Macintyre and myself initially developed WasteLess as part of the IBM Call for Code Challenge, a global hackathon for creating open source code to address the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We became deeply passionate about our idea so took it further by entering this concept into the Student Innovation Awards, winning the award for Planetary Impact.
How have your Bachelor of Commerce studies helped create this startup and win the competition?
My degree in Commerce and majors in Design and Marketing allowed me to understand our concept as a tech product as well as a business. This allowed me to work with my interdisciplinary team to think of WasteLess beyond the technical components – including the business model, usability, metrics to indicate success and impact. These business components were crucial for the Student Innovation Awards as we were asked questions about market sizing and our business model by the judges.
What were the highlights and challenges of participating in this competition?
When we entered the Student Innovation Awards competition, we were in the process of considering turning WasteLess from a competition idea to a real startup. The highlight of winning this competition was gaining support for our idea and some money to help us kickstart it.
The key challenges included thinking about WasteLess as a startup rather than a hackathon project which it was initially created for. This included identifying target markets, value proposition, business model and impact measurement. To come up with this, it was challenging to conduct primary research and assess the viability of our idea as a startup in a short timeframe.
What career skills do you think you developed through this opportunity?
This has been an incredible opportunity to develop my experience and skills in software development. My team included two designers and two developers where we worked together to develop the app, including the code. This has been invaluable to me for working in the tech industry in the future. The opportunity has also developed important research skills in customer interviews and user testing which will be used in my future career.
What’s next for WasteLess?
We’re continuously iterating WasteLess and are working to validate the concept to launch it as a startup. The first step is actually a name change – when entering the competition, we did not check if the name and domain were already taken! Currently, my team is receiving mentorship from two people with experience in start-ups and food related technology innovations. We’re also working hard to conduct more market research and to hopefully release an MVP for testing. If you’re interested in having a chat about WasteLess, please feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.
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