Entrepreneurial Spirit at HKU – Adventurous, Innovative, Resilient, and More
Wong On Yan’s Story
HKU Business School
BBA
Developing a product, and founding a start-up sound very cool. You can be your own boss and enjoy a great deal of flexibility, yet being a true entrepreneur is never easy, especially to full-time university students. Jenna, Wong On Yan, an undergraduate business student majoring in Entrepreneurship, Design, and Innovation (EDI), demonstrates what an entrepreneurial spirit means as we borrow from her success story in winning the Second Prize in the 8th Hong Kong University Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition.
Jenna and her dedicated teammates invented an automated shopping trolley, named Follo. Their cutting-edge product is elderly-tailored by aiding the elderly to load and transfer the groceries back home, with an aim to alleviate their burden in grocery experience. It is comprised of a cart for storage, a lifter for carriage, a soft lid (on top of the cart) serving as a seat for resting, and an advanced sensor for following the user.
Idea pitching on “Follo” for the Competition
“Since I could observe the general elderly group having difficulty in bending over for shelved goods and carrying them in the supermarket, I really want to help them.” Jenna recalled vividly. This scenario is so visible to her that has fueled her passion and eventually throw herself into product development of this kind in the Competition.
She and a friend of hers, Enoch Ng who has a major in computer science, share unanimously that the ingredient of a student entrepreneur is not only about acquiring design thinking methods or other technical skills in the market, but it is about whether one dares to dream and attempt to do trial-and-error. Bringing up the statistic of a typical failure rate in start-up – 9 out of 10 start-ups running out of business, they hope to remind all student entrepreneurs to be not just innovative, but adventurous and resilient. Cliché as it may sound, one has to remember why he / she started, and what impact he / she wants to bring.
Mentorship and friendship are crucial along the entrepreneur journey. (Jenna on second left)
In the future when you see a similar robot trolley strolling around in the wet market, you can share the pride that it might be from members of our HKU community!
Written by:
Jonathan Ngai
Year 3, Faculty of Social Sciences
January 2023
