A True Race Against Time
The Defying48 is a fun entrepreneurial rally, where the task is to launch and grow a temporary business in 48 hours – starting out with just a single dollar. Participants have to use the budget and resources they have at their disposal to seize opportunities, overcome entrepreneurial and economic challenges, and finally, to conquer adversity.
The objective is simple: accumulate as many points and profits as possible before time runs out, all while demonstrating good financial practices. Teams, each composed of four or five members and accompanied by a business and/or finance professional, are provided with transportation to carry out their mission throughout the city, overcome each challenge, and implement the strategy they have defined. One member from each team must also stay at HQ to guide their team. They then play a more than crucial role: they are the one who dictates the game.
Teams are constantly grappling with factors related to economy, growth, abundance, and lack of resources. They must overcome an economic crisis, labor shortage, and a trade embargo, all while growing their own trade!
Ingenuity, creativity, interpersonal skills, collaboration, and resourcefulness have never developed so radically, and quickly.
An Event In Tune with the Times
Especially in the current context, an entrepreneurial spirit proves to be crucial and salutary, not only as an innovative mechanism, but as a vector within our recovery strategy that inspires confidence and will have undeniable social and human impact.
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The development of entrepreneurial qualities, such as resilience, problem-solving ability, and adaptability, will be necessary to train a strong succession capable of overcoming the trials of the present and future.
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In this perspective, we commit ourselves to train today's youth who will be open to the current situation and who will act with sensitivity and rationality.
Testimonials
"Defying48 has been a great source of learning for me. Firstly, I learned how to sell a product or a service in real life. Also, I learned the art of negotiation in the business world. I feel extensively equipped because of this experience."
"I learned that perseverance is necessary in business. You must not give up, because, sometimes, when nothing further happens, you need to persevere to reach your goals."
"You have to be flexible. Resilience is extremely important because many challenges will change our business plans. I particularly enjoyed the tasks in the Defi48; when I realized that we actually had customers, I understood that it was more than a simulation: it was real."
The Defying48 Experience
"We have finally arrived. Agitated. Anxious. Nervous. We really don't know what to expect. Personally, I signed up because a challenge during which we have to create a product or a service, set up our company, market everything, and close actual sales, it excites me. It ignites what we call the business instinct, and I want to prove to myself that I am capable of launching the entire life cycle of a company in 48 hours. After all, if Defi 48 exists, it must be possible, all of this.
We are divided into teams; I am with two people I know a bit and two people I do not know at all. We have to elect the strategist, that is the member of our team who will stay at headquarters or in the control room with the facilitators. The strategist is the one who will bear the brunt of what the facilitators call challenges. What I understand is that these will be fake but believable and conceivable obstacles that we will have to overcome, bypass, or downright break.
The race is on. It's not easy to agree, among team members, on a product or a service, on the need to fulfill and the desire to stir within our surroundings, on the distribution of the steps that are required in its design and implementation. We have to make a business canvas, after agreeing. Target audience. Competition. Communication, dissemination, availability, and distribution/retrieval channels. Allies. Potential obstacles. All of this in barely two hours. I've already accomplished the equivalent of a week's work and it's not even lunchtime yet.
My teammates elected me as the strategist, which means, among other things, that I have to put up with the facilitators and the other strategists. It's not easy to concentrate when all the participants are trying to be on the alert for everything and yet, we are in control of nothing except for our product or our service. I think it's going well, that the team on the ground has divided the task up properly, but suddenly, the facilitators present us, or rather impose a challenge on us, what I prefer to call a collection of nails and screws under the tires. The ranking they display about every four hours also helps to spur us on. They infuriate me, these facilitators: it's like they are taking delight, the irreverent ones, in provoking punctures and hiding the jack and the spare tire. But no time to feel sorry for myself and let down my team, our product, and all the customers who will benefit from it!
It goes on like this for two full days. We eat when we can, that is, when the moment we think about it coincides with the time we have available then. We have hardly slept at all. We worked beyond the official closing of the first day, to get ahead, to have everything spot-on and ready to disseminate and sell from the very early start of the second day. Customers are counting on us: expectations are already high!
Things are in full swing. Of course, there are the usual technical hiccups, a few customers we struggle to reach who don't necessarily respond promptly and a part of what we developed which doesn't seem to find takers. We've learnt that we offer too many options, that we're not clear enough with customers and potential customers, and that we can't rely on technology without a contingency plan and a backup strategy. In short, everything is not going smoothly; in fact, the only little reliefs we have, which are few and far between, last for a maximum of 30 minutes at a time. That being said, it's mind-blowing, surreal, disorienting: we find out more about ourselves in 48 hours than we would in an entire year.
Nevertheless, there are the famous challenges, these always untimely restrictions that the facilitators present about every two hours, even though it seems like there's one every 15 minutes. Just when you think you've finally regained your stride, bam, another detour or another checkpoint, another spillage of nails and screws, another complete pole between the spokes of the wheel.
I mustn't spoil anything for you though: it's up to you to sign up for Defi48 to truly experience, endure, and overcome these situations in depth. I can however tell you that we never think about the possibility that they don't really affect the world economy and politics, as the facilitators claim, that the customers they caricature as supposed characters may exist but not certainly, that the cutting-edge news in international relations is so plausible that we submit to it without asking any questions. I think what motivates us is to prove to ourselves that we are capable of overcoming everything, of facing everything, of conquering everything, so that we'll be ready when it happens, not if it happens.
Despite having set up all this, having created, produced, developed, disseminated, sold, and pursued beyond the sale, we still reflect on what we have learnt, gained, risked, and established among each of us and within our own inner selves. I think we become entrepreneurs with regards to our creation and its marketing, sure, but also despite all of the circumstances that impact the global economy. And we are an integral part of the business world."
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