Who can enter,
and how it works.
GQC is built for students who want to do original work and have it taken seriously. Read the rules below before you start an application — most of what people get wrong is here.
The four rules.
- Age
- Every team member had to be aged between 14 and 22 on the day applications opened (1 March 2026).
- Enrolment
- All members must be currently enrolled in secondary school or in an undergraduate programme. Recent graduates within twelve months of completion are eligible.
- Team size
- Teams of two to five students. Solo entries are not accepted in the open round but are admissible in the Invitational Track on a case-by-case basis.
- Originality
- Work must be the team’s own and produced for GQC during the 2026 cycle. Projects previously submitted to other competitions are allowed if substantially extended; teams must declare this in the entry form.
Six months from open call to Global Final.
What we ask for.
The first-stage application is deliberately short. We are looking for clear thinking, not slick presentation. You will need:
- A 500-word problem brief — the problem you want to work on, who is affected, and why you are the right team to look at it.
- A 90-second video introducing the team. Phone footage is fine; rehearsed studio video is not required.
- Team details: school or university, year of study, country of residence, age on 1 March 2026.
- One short reference from a teacher, lecturer or programme leader who can vouch for the team.
Shortlisted teams are notified by 12 June and then enter the Learning Experience, where the deliverables expand: an evidence pack, a working prototype or campaign artefact, and a six-minute pitch. The Judging Criteria explain how each deliverable is weighted.
No team is priced out.
The standard registration fee is £30 per team to cover platform costs. The fee is waived in full for any school or university listed on the UK’s POLAR4 quintile-one register, on the US Pell-eligible list, or for any team applying from a country on the World Bank low- or lower-middle-income list. Teams in any other situation can request a fee waiver in the application form; we do not ask why.
Travel and accommodation for shortlisted teams attending a regional showcase are funded directly by GQC and our city hosts. Teams reaching the Global Final receive a fully-covered travel bursary to New York.
A filled 500-word shape a stranger can argue with.
This is a training demonstration. It is not a 2026 shortlisted team and not a result. Unique role of this site: a three-city innovation award. 2026 applications closed 22 May; the method below is the archive of how a brief was read.
| Field | Invented demonstration (Kwun Tong after-school desk) |
|---|---|
| Problem | A Tuesday tutoring shift loses about forty minutes to paper attendance before any homework is seen. |
| Who is affected | Six tutors and about thirty S1–S3 students in one rented classroom, named with the centre’s permission in the pack — not “youth globally.” |
| Materials already in hand | Two evenings of shadowing notes; a photocopy of last term’s paper roll; a staff member willing to trial a paper-plus-phone log for three Tuesdays. |
| Assumptions | Tutors will use a log if it is faster than the roll. The centre will not buy tablets. Attendance is a process problem, not a marketing problem. |
| Team fit | Three Form 5 students who already tutor there. They can return every Tuesday for eleven weeks. They cannot claim a city-wide rollout from one room. |
What this brief refuses: a market-size opening, a slogan about empowering youth, an app mock-up with no user, a claim that the team has already solved attendance. What a juror can argue with: the forty minutes, the three-Tuesday trial, the no-tablet constraint. Track choice (Digital & AI or Brand & Communication) follows from whether the artefact is a log that runs or a behaviour change in one school. Same method on Programme.