It's been a while since I sat in a classroom for more than an hour but last Saturday, I found myself sitting for four hours at an SMU (Singapore Management University) World Travel & Tourism Class – and guess what, the time just flew.

I was there with Sue Heilbronner, CEO of TravelShark, who I had roped in at the last minute to help me judge the pitches for our WITNext Summercamp event on June 21-22 at Artspace@Helutrans. Also with us was Syazanah Haniff, who is running WITNext.

Prof Aaron Hung had asked if we would submit our event for this term's competition – the scores go towards their overall grades – so it's a pretty serious undertaking.

Our brief to the students was: Come up with a marketing plan to drive participants to our Summercamp, an activity programme for the live event that would be fun, enriching and engaging and a list of exhibitors/sponsors they'd like to see at the event.

We also asked each team to produce a video on "My Dream Job" as part of the competition we will be launching for the Summercamp. (We will share these  videos at a later stage, one of them brought tears to Sue's eyes.)

There were two other projects – one involving a marketing campaign for a destination and another for a retail travel agency.

I won't share those because that's not my place to do so but have to say, the three teams that took on our Summercamp delivered impressive presentations.

I suppose it's because the "WITNext Summercamp: Travel. Not Just A Job" is a project that speaks to their hearts and plight. Most of them are about to leave school to face that moment of truth when they have to step into that big world out there and get a job and, as we know, the best ideas are personal, when they matter to you yourself.

Full story:

www.webintravel.com//blog/the-best-ideas-are-collaborative-we-learnt-this-in-a-classroom_3118