St Thomas of Canterbury College win MOVAC High Growth Award

St Thomas students with Movac Partner Mark Vivian

I recently had the pleasure of sharing a table with the winners of the Young Enterprise Trust (“YET”) High Growth Award along with MOVAC Partners Sharon Weaver and Mark Vivian.  MOVAC has been a proud sponsor of the programme for the past 5 years.  YET run an outstanding programme in secondary schools throughout New Zealand that exposes students to the possibility of creating and running a business.  Something that MOVAC and our investors are pretty passionate about.

Young Enterprise Trust is a charitable trust whose vision is to grow a more prosperous New Zealand through enterprise.  We see our purpose as a not for profit is to inspire, educate and transformstudents through enterprise experience.

Testing the Lion

This years winners of our award were from St Thomas of Canterbury College who founded a venture called A.C.E. – Advanced Clean Energies.  I was floored by the imagination, creativity and execution of this group of 16 and 17 year olds and what they’d managed to achieve in under 9 months.  Their inspiration came from the Christchurch earthquakes and a need to generate electricity when the power went down.  The product they created they call Lion.  Lion is a recharger that generates electricity from the heat differential between two plates.  Essentially it’s a pot lid that generates electricity from boiling water!  It generates enough to put a partial charge back on your cell phone.  Brilliant!

They have sold a number of these throughout New Zealand and have also commenced discussions to trial a modified version of the product with a village in Arusha, Tanzania, working through Edmund Rice School.  You can read more about ACE here:

• Emergency power generator
• Ace team wins young enterprise award
• NZ’s first young managing director of the year award

MOVAC is indebted to its Fund 2 investment group who have underwritten our sponsorship of YET over the last 4 years.