Hack the Harvest: the immersion day that changed how students solve problems
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
Who United Exports are and why the problems are real
If you have bought a punnet of OZblu blueberries, you have bought a Western Australian product. United Exports is headquartered in Canning Vale, and its brand, OZblu, has blueberry varieties grown in more than a dozen countries and distributed to every major global market.
United Exports is involved in breeding collaborations, growing, packing, shipping, marketing and sales. That means it owns problems across the entire chain, from plant genetics through to what a consumer sees on a supermarket shelf.
It also means the challenges students were handed were not simulations. They were live operational and commercial questions from a company competing globally out of Perth.
Learn more about United Exports: united-exports.com | ozblu.com
The immersion day: a first for us
The Saturday started at the United Exports farm at Orange Springs. This was the first time Venture UWA has run an immersion day like this, and it changed the entire weekend.
Students walked the rows. They saw how the fruit is grown, picked, sorted and packed. They asked the farm team direct questions about labour, water, timing, waste, quality control and what happens when a harvest window shifts.
The difference this makes is hard to overstate. Students who arrive at a challenge with only a brief tend to solve the problem they imagine. Students who have stood in the environment solve the problem that actually exists. By the time the group got back to Perth, they were not guessing at pain points. They had heard them first-hand, from the people living with them.
That is the model we want to keep building on.
Design thinking, then a weekend of building
At the farm, Venture UWA's Chloe Bull and the Venture UWA team facilitated a design thinking program to turn everything students had seen into something structured.
Design thinking is not a buzzword exercise. It is a way of forcing yourself to define the problem properly before you fall in love with a solution. Teams worked through what they had observed, narrowed to a specific user and a specific pain point, generated options, and then killed the ideas that did not hold up.
Then they built. Teams spent the rest of the weekend refining their concepts with support from the United Exports team on hand, which meant they could test an assumption and get an answer in minutes rather than guessing for hours.
The quality of what came out was genuinely high. Solutions ranged across the operation, and several went straight at problems the business is actively working on.
What people said
"It was a unique and rewarding experience to travel to the blueberry farm where OZblu berries are produced and get a firsthand look at the challenges and opportunities within the farm."
"A huge thank you to Venture UWA , United Exports , OZblu , Western Berry Company, Chloe Bull and Megan Henschel for organising the hackathon and for their mentorship, guidance and contagious energy throughout the four days."
Why this format works
Three things made Hack the Harvest work, and we will be repeating all of them.
Immersion beats briefing. Getting students physically into the business produced sharper problem definition than any document could.
A real partner in the room. United Exports did not drop off a challenge and leave. Their team stayed engaged across the weekend, which raised the standard of the work and gave students direct access to industry.
Structure before speed. The design thinking program stopped teams from jumping to solutions, which is the most common way a hackathon idea falls apart on presentation day.
None of the students who took part will graduate as blueberry specialists. That was never the point. What they will take with them is the ability to walk into an unfamiliar industry, ask good questions, define the real problem and build something useful in a short window. That skill transfers to every job they will ever have.
Thank you
Huge thanks to the United Exports team for opening their farm and their business to a group of students, and for backing the idea of an immersion day before anyone had seen it work.
Thanks to the Venture UWA committee for helping with the facilitation, and to every student who gave up a weekend to solve someone else's problem.
Want in on the next one?
Venture UWA runs hackathons, innovation challenges and industry programs across the year, free for all UWA students and alumni. You do not need a business idea or a technical background to take part.
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