The upcoming Idea-cation 2024 focuses on innovating tourism to boost local economy. The event encourages teams to engage in creativity, innovative thinking, and entrepreneurial approaches to identify key contextual elements of a destination—such as local/regional resources, heritage, and culture—and transform them into value-added components. The goal is to create unique themes that can possibly enhance a destination’s regional economy through tourism while incorporating hospitality, events, retail, and culinary aspects. This year’s Idea-cation is divided into two categories: High School Student Category and Open Category respectively. There are two exciting themes that allow participants to apply their creativity and propose innovative ideas in alignment with government economic strategies.

In addition to the field trip, finalist teams will participate in the 2-day on-campus activities on 26 October and 10 November 2024. Judges (industry elites and UTM faculty members) will evaluate finalist teams’ pitching performance and final outputs to determine the winning teams.