A highly competitive 2.5-week design sprint — a real charity partner, real constraints, a pitch at the end that had to earn the room.
MIG is Monash's answer to a simple problem: most engineering programs teach you to solve problems that have already been defined. This didn't. A live charity partner brought an open-ended challenge, and a small cross-disciplinary team had 2.5 weeks to define the problem, design a response, and defend it — using the same design-sprint methodology Google Ventures runs with early-stage startups.
Structured like a real sprint: understand and map the problem, diverge into concepts, converge on one, prototype it fast, then test the logic before it ever reached the pitch deck. No stage got more time than it needed — the constraint was the point.
The program is explicitly benchmarked against the EU Entrepreneurship Competence Framework and the World Economic Forum's Top Skills 2030 — less about the specific pitch, more about proving the underlying muscle: spotting opportunities, working with ambiguity, and moving a room from problem to conviction in under three weeks.
Closed with a live pitch to the charity partner and a judging panel — presenting not just a concept, but the reasoning behind every decision that got the team there.