Wildcats: My Summer Startup

When COVID-19 closed campuses across Vietnam and Thailand, the moment for a student startup challenge looked as bad as it could be. Universities were shut, events were cancelled and the students Wildcats wanted to reach were dispersed, anxious and cut off from their usual communities.

Wildcats, a global platform and incubator building a community of innovators and entrepreneurs, had chosen this moment to launch its first regional challenge, My Summer Startup. It needed to generate real business ideas from Vietnamese and Thai university students at scale, in two languages, without a single physical touchpoint.

The strategic bet was that uncertainty makes ambition more, not less, appealing if someone gives young people permission to pursue it. The campaign framed the challenge as an invitation to chase big dreams in a difficult time, and treated the lockdown as a reason to participate rather than an obstacle.

Ruder Finn Era's teams in Vietnam and Thailand worked as one unit. Instead of relying on paid reach, the team used its network to engage university administrations, lecturers, student presidents and online forum communities directly, so the challenge was shared from inside student networks. Virtual townhalls, workshops and mini-contests with universities kept momentum, and Gen Z influencers with credibility in the startup scene brought the story to a wider audience. By the deadline the challenge had 239 business ideas, from which regional and country winners were chosen.