Bringing Brilliant Ideas to Life
If you have a bright idea for starting a business, HKUST can help you make it shine.
Through the HKUST Entrepreneurship Center, we give students the opportunity to turn their concepts into reality by providing them with the resources they need. These include workshops, advice, mentorship programs and competitions that enable students to acquire the necessary skills and experience to get their own startups off the ground. We also organize the HKUST-Sino One Million Dollar Entrepreneurship Competition, with prizes that can be used as seed money.
From bread to beer
Every day, local bakeries and supermarket chains in Hong Kong throw away tonnes of food waste, much of which is unsold bread. For one group of HKUST students, this represented both a problem and an opportunity.
Naman TEKRIWAL, an Indian national, and teammates Anushka PUROHIT, Deevansh GUPTA and Suyash MOHAN, thought that rather than letting surplus bread be sent to landfill they would turn it into a new craft beer — Breer. Seeking help to launch their brand, they turned to the Entrepreneurship Center and joined the HKUST-Sino One-Million-Dollar Entrepreneurship Competition.
The Breer Team won the Competition’s Platinum Award and shortly after began selling their products — a lager and pale ale — which have quickly gained traction among beer lovers in Hong Kong. Equally important, the new venture has helped to alleviate the growing problem of food waste, saving three square kilometres of landfill in just one year.
Minor in Entrepreneurship, Class of 2023
Entrepreneurship for Social Good
Breer is not the only socially responsible start-up Naman helped to launch. Back in India, he played a key role in the founding of Rural Invest, which helps the rural poor save for the future by pooling money into mutual funds through systematic investment plans (SIP)s.
Another initiative in which Naman was involved is the Young Tycoons Business Challenge (YTBC), now one of the world's largest high school entrepreneurship competitions. According to Naman, the idea for the competition was based on his personal experience and lack of opportunities for high school students to learn about setting up a new business.
“The Entrepreneurship Centre (EC) was able to connect us with major organizations like Jardine Restaurant Group. We are doing our pilot and collaboration with them, like the Pizza Hut chain, and Mr. Donny SIU (Head of Entrepreneurship Programs) has also been making an effort to connect us with a few incubators ... that has been extremely helpful.”