NGI Program

The Challenge program has turned out to be a marvelous learning tool for the participants and for RBC. The students’ responses teach us how the next generation of entrepreneurs and business leaders think, use technology and interact with the world. Some of their ideas — such as the RBC Better Student Life  site — have been developed as part of our business. Through the Challenge, we teach participants how to turn thoughts into clearly communicated ideas, present a business case, and interact in the boardroom with today’s business leaders.

We gain fresh perspectives in how to reach out to our clients, and participants gain an inside look at the real-life workings of the business world — and a chance to win some significant prize money.

Challenge milestones

Along the way, we’ve celebrated several milestones in the Next Great Innovator program:

• 2006 – launch of the first RBC Next Great Innovator Challenge
• 2007 – the Challenge becomes a part of course curriculum at some universities and colleges across Canada; an SMS service, social bookmarking and mobile optimization of the site are introduced
• 2008 – introduction of the Collaboration Space, allowing team members to share version-controlled documents, and the “Innovation In Action” course
• 2009 – first ever RBC Innovator Mini Challenge is issued; new features, such as custom alerts, are added to the Challenge
• 2010 – fifth anniversary of the Challenge is celebrated with a relaunched website. What’s ahead? Stay tuned! The exciting thing about being an innovator is that you are constantly reinventing — and that means changing the future. But in the true spirit of innovation, we know that the Next Great Innovator program will continue to be a challenging, thought-provoking, exciting part of RBC.
• 2011 – introduction of facebook badging and a new incremental submission process offering prizes for participation all through the competition. Offering an interview with RBC to each member of the top 5 teams.