Why do most pitch contests fall short? Because it leads with a business plan instead of a business solution. Young people don’t have vast business experience so they don’t know what problem their business can solve. But young people are great at problem-solving.

Business planning events are academic endeavors. We’ve developed an event that creates real-world business solutions.

We wrote the playbook for running an efficient, effective youth innovation challenge.

so, How’s it work?

Choose a playbook-only option or playbook+additional support. Then We’ll walk you through our program from:

• identifying a best-fit venue

• creating a budget

• working with school districts

• soliciting business problems

• approaching partnering organizations

• identifying the best value-add innovation & entrepreneurship experts

• gathering event outcome metrics

• and more!

It can be industry agnostic, industry-focused, or community-focused. Customize to your organizations’ needs.

• Want to ask local industry for real-world business problems to solve?

• Want to focus on a community problem?

• Want to create an imaginary problem and let hackers develop blue-sky solutions?

Additional Pricing

additional services available:

• Don’t want to run the event yourself but just have our expert team do the heavy lifting?

  Fully Managed — All event details managed and staffed by the Ladig Consulting team.

• Want to do the boots-on-the-ground work leading up to the event, but we’ll take care of the event itself?

  Partial Support — Includes Playbook Only plus event assessment sample, 90-minute virtual onboarding meeting, 120 minutes of virtual/f2f meeting support throughout planning, unlimited* email support leading up to event, Event day staffed and ran by Ladig Consulting team

• Want to run the event yourself but have some best practices and general support from us?

  Partners — Includes Playbook Only plus event assessment sample, 90-minute virtual onboarding meeting, 120 minutes of virtual/f2f meeting support throughout planning, unlimited* email support leading up to event

• Add a la carte support options are also available:

  • Venue and Logistics

  • Fundraising

  • Promotion

  • Post-Event Assessment Management

*within reason

Photo credit: W. Bryant Rozier