Georgie Burgess
13 November 2025: Rising to the challenge, a team of three University of Canberra students have battled it out against six other Innovation Central teams to win the National Industry Innovation Network (NIIN) MasterTech Challenge at this week’s Cisco Live 2025 event.
It is the second year in a row that the University has taken home the top gong for the competition program which was created and led by Innovation Central Melbourne at La Trobe University.
This year’s (ICC) winners are still riding a roller coaster of emotions from their victory.
“It still feels quite surreal, we all dreamt of winning and worked really hard to achieve it but still when we heard the words Canberra come out of her mouth it was shocking – we’re still trying to take it all in,” said Bachelor of Information Technology (IT) student Myeisha Foo.
This year’s challenge, sponsored by Coles Group, asked: “How might Coles make the shopper experience more engaging and personalised?”
The team chose to re-invent Coles’ reward system for their project – transforming it from something that simply rewards purchases into something that recognises customers’ presence in-store.
“Reward programs at the moment can often make customers feel like walking wallets who are only recognised for their payments – we want to change that, so we have created a step tracker that rewards people for simply wandering around the store,” Ms Foo explained.
The team didn’t stop there though, also creating an Artificial Intelligence (AI) generated quest for each customer to complete when in store to earn even more points, as well as the chance to donate their prizes to charity.
“Through the Coles app and AI, we made a program that can analyse prior transactions and take customers to areas where they have previously purchased things, for instance cookies, and when they’re on sale it’ll take them there on a personalised treasure hunt,” said Ms Foo who is specialising in robotics and AI.
It was this blend of creativity, technical strength, and social impact the judges recognised when awarding the top prize.
The final year students have received more than just bragging rights – accepting $10,000 in funding to ICC to help continue the development and scale of their initiative.
“I’m really looking forward to getting back to Canberra with the rest of my team and working hard to see if it is possible to bring this system into operation across the Coles network,” said Bachelor of IT student Simone Chitsinde.
Bachelor of IT student Jay Siyani is also ready to put the knowledge he learnt from the four-day challenge into action.
“We did manage to take some time away from the competition and got to meet a lot of other companies and got to see their ideas and how they implement their programs in the real world – which has helped to shape our plans for developing this further,” said Mr Siyani.
Reg Johnson, Director of Education and Strategic Industries at Cisco Systems congratulated the ICC team on their win.
"The National Industry Innovation Network is a catalyst for future talent, connecting students, academics, and industry to create real-world innovation in the AI era. This program exemplifies our commitment to collaboration and nurturing the next generation of technology leaders.
“Congratulations to the University of Canberra students for their impressive achievement. We look forward to seeing their prototype develop further with the ICC team and Coles. Together, we are helping to accelerate the adoption of digital technology innovation and deliver real impact."