Last week, students from the University of Liverpool and Berlin School of Economics and Law (BSEL) joined forces to share ideas and propose sustainable solutions for Eurovision song contest events happening across the Liverpool City Region (LCR).
80 students come together over three days in Liverpool to meet with representatives from Peel Ports, The Growth Platform, Taylor Wessing, BDO, GIGMATE, Angel Solutions, VoiceforNature, Zest Events Management, Food Standards Agency, 2030hub, LCR Combined Authority and Bank of America.
Over the course of the challenge, students formed inter-institutional teams and developed and pitched their ideas to panels of professionals from high profile Liverpool City Region (LCR) organisations.
Alexandra Nolan-Webster, Rail Project Manager at the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority said: “It has been so inspiring to see students from different universities and disciplines collaborating on the issues we face as a region to make Eurovision events sustainable. The students were professional, enthusiastic and extremely passionate and the use of tech-enhanced solutions was impressive too. The students were very confident presenting innovative ideas to the panel.”
The event formed part of an enhanced student engagement programme delivered by the university’s Careers and Employability team this year. The Sustainable Eurovision Challenge was open to students with an interest in enterprise or entrepreneurship and was designed to develop key employability skills, such as, idea generation, collaboration, pitching and public speaking.
An amazing few days we’ve had with our Big Enterprise Challenge – A Sustainable Eurovision 2023 🎵💙
Students from across @livuni and @HWR_Berlin were set an exciting challenge by @CultureLPool 🤩
Congratulations to the winners and the students who took part 👏 pic.twitter.com/mm3UOvtOlp
— Careers & Employability, University of Liverpool (@livunicareers) April 19, 2023
The winning team proposed an innovative travel pass, to enable sustainable travel across the city on all networks, and allow travel operators to anticipate demand as well as re-introduce a night bus service.
The runners up proposed compostable bamboo portaloos, to help reduce the chemical waste involved with traditional portaloos, as well as more sustainable travel between events as they were designed to be flatpack. The team in third place proposed smart solar powered mobile waste disposal system to help sort, collect and transport waste generated by events in the city.
Iwan Williams, Director of Careers and Employability said: “As this year’s Eurovision host city it was only right that we tapped into the talent we have here at the university to bring fresh and exciting ideas to help solve real problems the city will face.”
“Sustainability is such an important topic and something students and employers are passionate about. Bringing them together through the Sustainable Eurovision Challenge in an authentic environment enabled connections to grow and ideas to flourish, but also provided solutions to take forward. It was a pleasure to host students from BSEL too, and an experience the students involved will never forget”.
If you would like to know more about employability enhancing activities, competitions and events look out for the weekly careers e-newsletter every Monday, check out the latest opportunities on Handshake, and make sure to follow @livunicareers on twitter, instagram, youtube, linkedin, and tiktok.