By Anusha Allawala | Head of Student Development |15th July 2026
If you’re a teenager who’s ever looked at a problem in your community and thought “someone should fix this”, the LSE Generate Global Innovation Challenge (LGIC) is built for exactly that instinct.
What is the LGIC?
LGIC is an annual, fully virtual pitch competition open to high school students aged 13–18 worldwide. It’s run in partnership between LSE Generate, the entrepreneurship hub of the London School of Economics and Crimson Education, the global university admissions consultancy. Students work individually or in teams of 2–4 to identify a real-world problem tied to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, then build a solution and pitch it: first through a regional qualifier submission, and if selected, live on Zoom in front of a global judging panel.
It’s genuinely worldwide. The competition covers five regions: APAC, North America, Europe & Central Asia, Latin America, and MENA/Africa/Russia with the top teams from each region advancing to the Global Finals.
Why this is a real opportunity, not just another "resume booster"
A few things set LGIC apart from the usual list of teen competitions:
- It’s entrepreneurship, not just an essay contest. Students go through the actual arc of building something: spotting a problem, designing a solution, pitching it, and defending it under a live Q&A. .
- The prizes have teeth. Winners receive cash prizes, a virtual internship with LSE Social Enterprise founders, mentorship, and global publication of their work, not just a certificate that goes in a drawer.
- It’s backed by people who evaluate university applications for a living. Built with Crimson Education, so the skills it rewards are exactly what stands out in university applications.
- No prior experience required. You don’t need to have run a business or coded an app. You need a problem you actually care about and the willingness to think it through properly.
Last year's winners: what "good" looked like
The 2025 season pulled in over 2,000 students from more than 100 countries — a big jump from its first year which says something about how much traction this has gained. Here’s who came out on top:
1st place — Team KnowACHE (Shirley Yuan & Elina Yuan): a pediatric healthcare access app, tackling the gap in how children and families connect with medical care.
2nd place — Team Requital (Hassan Atif & M. Nasik Tariq, Pakistan): a genuinely clever piece of engineering. A device that gives farmers lab-quality soil salinity data directly in the field, aimed at helping rural communities treat and manage salinity damage without needing to send samples off for testing.
3rd place — Aarav Doshi (India), with “Threadlock”: a solution targeting 6PPD, a chemical pollutant released from vehicle tires that contaminates waterways — an unusually specific and technical environmental problem for a teenager to take on.
What connects all three: none of them picked an abstract or trendy topic. Each one solved something concrete, local, and explainable in a sentence — a pediatric care gap, a farming problem, a pollution source. That’s a useful pattern for anyone thinking about entering.
What the judges are actually looking for
Based on the competition’s own judging criteria, three things matter most:
- Feasibility — could this actually be built and used, or is it a nice idea that falls apart under questioning?
- Innovation — is there a genuine new angle, not just a repackaged existing idea?
- Real-world potential — does it scale beyond a single classroom or town, and does it show a credible sense of who would use it and why?
These get tested twice: once on paper, in the pitch deck, and again live, in a Q&A where judges like industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and academics push on the weak points. Teams that do well tend to have thought through the “why won’t this work” questions before anyone asks them.
Should you apply?
If you’re a student who already has an idea nagging at you, a problem in your school, your neighborhood, or your country that no one seems to be solving. LGIC is a low-barrier, high-upside way to test it. You don’t need capital, a company, or a technical co-founder. You need a clear problem, a workable solution, and the willingness to defend it in front of people who will ask hard questions.
That combination of thinking like a founder before you’re old enough to be one is exactly the kind of head start that’s hard to manufacture any other way.