Eleven weeks
that change the
conversation.
Shortlisted teams join a structured, mentored programme between June and September. It is the part of GQC alumni talk about most. The aim is not to win the competition; it is to leave knowing how to do this kind of work for the rest of your career.
Week by week.
Workshops on problem statements, stakeholder mapping and ethics review. Teams produce a one-page brief that is critiqued line-by-line by their assigned mentor.
Methods clinics led by academics from HKUST, Imperial and NYU. Teams run interviews, build short surveys, and audit existing literature. The deliverable is an evidence pack — fifteen to twenty pages of sources, transcripts and field notes.
For Digital & AI teams: prototype sprints in small studios with industry engineers. For Brand & Communication teams: campaign labs with senior planners and creative directors. Both tracks share the same review days so teams see each other’s work.
Pitch rehearsals with the mentor pool, including a mock jury made up of senior judges from previous cycles. Every team receives a written rehearsal critique addressing argument structure, slide craft and live Q&A.
Teams travel to their host city for the public showcase: a three-day event with jury sessions, a public exhibition floor and a closing ceremony. Costs are covered by GQC and the host university.
Small, peer-heavy, written-down.
We deliberately limit class size to twelve teams per cohort. Each cohort meets twice weekly: once in a live masterclass with an external lecturer, once in a smaller peer-review clinic where teams critique one another’s drafts under their mentor’s supervision.
Cohorts are mixed across cities. A Hong Kong team and a London team can sit in the same clinic — the difference in context is part of the point. Most material is delivered in English; live translation is provided where teams request it.
Lectures are recorded and indexed; written notes are returned within forty-eight hours of every clinic. We think the most useful artefact is the paper trail, not the lecture itself.
Who you’ll work with.
Leads the methods clinics in Hong Kong. Previously head of insight at a Pan-Asian consumer health company.
Runs the prototype sprints for Digital & AI in London. Built triage software for the NHS before academia.
Faculty director in New York. Author of two books on early-stage venture pedagogy.
Mentors the Invitational Track teams. Sits on the Global Final jury.
Leads the campaign labs for Brand & Communication teams in London.
Convenes the cross-city showcase programme and the Impact Prize jury.
Task, iteration, test, contribution, review.
By week 8 a juror should be able to follow this trail without a pitch. Training checklist — not new official deliverables beyond the Learning Experience already on this page.
- Task. One sentence: what the artefact must do on a Tuesday in that room.
- Iteration log. Version, date, what broke, what you changed. Two failures is a trail; zero failures is a slide.
- Test record. Who used it, for how long, what you counted, what you ignored. A convenience sample is named as such.
- Contribution. Who wrote the log, who sat the trial, who will answer the mechanism question. Registered names are the team.
- Review item. Mentor or peer note within 48 hours of the clinic, mapped to one of the five published criteria — not a new weight.
Digital & AI: something a juror can launch. Brand & Communication: an artefact that actually went into the world (a poster that went up, a script tried with users). Weeks 9–10 are the first time slides matter. Host-university names on this site are published locations, not a claim that those universities run GQC.