Two IPC Students Win Third Place at the International Business Plan Competition Leading Scientific Fair 2025
Two IPC UII students won third place in the Leading Scientific Fair 2025 International Business Plan Competition. The competition, held on 11–12 October 2025 at the K.H.A Wahid Hasyim Building, UII, Nabila Aulia Zahra and Gadis Kurnia Khamba emerged as winners.
In the competition, the IPC UII team presented BridgeSkill, a web-based mentoring platform that connects retirees as mentors with UMKM owners. According to Nabila Aulia Zahra, this idea was inspired by her mother. This year, her mother retired, but her capacity allows her to facilitate UMKM players.
“I wanted to step out of my comfort zone, and my mother, because of this BridgeSkill idea, since my mother retired this year. I hope that one day this idea can be realised and be helpful, especially for retirees who still want to be productive and UMKMs that want to grow,” she said.
Similar to her teammate, Gadis Kurnia Khamba wanted to step out of her comfort zone and challenge herself by participating in this competition.
“My main motivation for joining this competition was to challenge myself to step out of my comfort zone and learn how to turn an abstract idea into a concrete, realistic business plan,” she said.
For both IPC Batch 2023 students, this competition was their first experience. They had no relevant experience whatsoever. However, they met the right mentor. One of the UII Communication Science lecturers, Ibnu Darmawan, S.I.Kom., M.I.Kom., was willing to guide them.
“Initially, I received several potential ideas from friends for mentoring this creative business plan project from Nabila and Gadis. From these many ideas, I began to select several options that seemed realistic and had great potential, considering that the key to a business idea is its feasibility. Especially if there are similar businesses already operating, this can be used as a benchmark to facilitate the preparation of the business flow,” said the UII Communication Science lecturer.
Ibnu Drmawan explained that the advantage of this idea is not only empowering the retiree community, but also helping the UMKM community, which is often constrained by funds to access professional business training or consultants.
After working hard for about a month to draft the proposal, Nabila and Gadis completed it. Their proposal, titled “Bridgeskill: Empowering Micro Small Medium Enterprises Through Expert Retiree Mentorship and Intergenerational Collaboration”, was accepted and placed them as finalists.
A few days later, based on the assessment of the proposal’s content, they advanced to the next stage, which was the idea presentation.
“We continued the mentorship for the presentation preparation. This time, we collaborated with Mrs. Lutviah, considering her expertise in English presentations. Unfortunately, due to various constraints, we could only conduct one rehearsal with very limited time,” added Ibnu Darmawan.
From this international competition experience, the participants gained many insights. In addition to establishing external relationships, they also understood how a business works.
“Of course, the relationships and advice from the judges to improve ourselves for future competitions,” said Nabila Aulia Zahra.
“This experience taught me a lot, even about aspects I had never considered before, like market research and revenue strategy. I gained a better understanding of how to build a business idea from scratch, collect supporting data, and prepare a presentation under tight deadlines. Since it was just me and one teammate, we really had to complement each other, split tasks wisely, and stay in sync even when things got hectic. It was definitely challenging, but it made me more confident and motivated to keep developing new ideas in the business field,” said Gadis Kurnia Khamba.
