Scores of people poured into the Vibewire Enterprise Hub on Friday morning last week to host a “FastBreak” breakfast event for the unrepresented faction of the current Australian Innovation Festival—youth innovation.

This year the national festival’s theme is the 4 “C’s” of innovation: Creativity, Connection, Collaboration and Commercialisation. The festival however appeared to be leaving behind youth voices, with no clear youth component or engagement strategy.

“Why is it that young people are not involved in this festival?”, asked Mary Nguyen, Director of Vibewire, to the Chair of the Festival, “as ultimately the technologies, and innovations being developed are the ones we as young people will have to live with. We want to be included in the conversation”.

Hence, Vibewire added a 5th “C” to the mix: Conversation. The FastBreak event featured 5 young speakers, for five minutes each on one of the 5 C’s of innovation. This event was part of Vibewire’s e-Festival of Ideas, a week long online conversation where young people interact with experts and think tanks on the issues that matter to them.

This year was the first time e-Festival of Ideas was included in the Australian Innovation Festival’s program.  Vibewire believes this is the start of meaningful youth participation in national initiatives for innovation.

“We believe that young people are naturally innovative and entrepreneurial. They don’t see problems, but rather opportunities to fill the gaps in the market, and then they just go about doing it,” says Vibewire co-director, Annie Le Cavalier.

The event was streamed live via uStream and can be viewed right here:

The speakers were:

Jye Smith (@jysemith) on Creativity

Scott Drummond (@Scott_Drummond) on Connection

Isadore Biffin (@IsadoreBiffin) on Collaboration

Elias Bizannes (@liako) on Commercialisation

Matt Moore (@Innotecture) on Conversation