Any student enrolled in high school, anywhere in the world. Some countries call it secondary school. Either way, if you're enrolled, you can compete.

What matters is where you are when you register. To be eligible, you must be enrolled in high school at the time you register. If you then graduate before the submission deadline, you're still eligible and can submit your pitch and compete in that year's competition.

If you're homeschooled, you're welcome too. You can compete if you're between 14 and 18 years old.

No. You can register and compete entirely on your own.

If a teacher at your school is championing the Blue Ocean Competition, though, we'd love to know who they are. Teachers who bring the competition to their students are a big part of why it reaches as many countries as it does, and we recognise them. You can tell us their name when you register.

No. The competition is completely free. Registering, the Blue Ocean Mini-Course, the resources, and submitting your pitch all cost nothing.

Yes, and it's free and included when you register.

Most companies compete head-to-head in crowded industries, offering much the same thing as everyone else and fighting over the same customers. Blue ocean strategy takes a different route. Rather than trying to beat the competition at what it already does, you change what the industry offers so that competing stops being the point. In practice that means questioning what an industry has always assumed is essential, raising the things buyers actually care about, and looking at the people who aren't buying from that industry at all. Done well, buyers get far more value while the business spends less to deliver it. Blue ocean strategy calls this value innovation.

The Mini-Course teaches you that way of thinking, and it's what judges are looking for in a winning pitch. It's also where a lot of students find their idea. Plenty of people register without knowing what they want to pitch and work it out as they go through the course.

You'll get a certificate of completion as soon as you finish, which is worth putting on a college application.

Any time before the pitch submission deadline. Registration stays open all year, so there's no separate cut-off to worry about — you can see this year's deadline on the competition timeline.

Registering early gives you more time with the Blue Ocean Mini-Course and the rest of the resources before you have to film anything, which is where most of the work actually is.

Yes to both. You can compete every year you're in high school, and you can bring back a pitch you've submitted before.

If you are resubmitting a previous pitch, we'd encourage you to improve it rather than send it as it was. A pitch you've reworked with what you learned last time has a far better chance of winning.

Either. It's completely up to you.

A team can have up to 5 students. Individual and team pitches are judged in exactly the same way, against the same criteria, and each pitch counts as one entry whether one student or five made it.

Yes, and plenty of students do. Your teammates can be from your own school, from a different school, or from a different country entirely.

If you don't have anyone to team up with yet, you'll get access to our online student community when you register and start the Blue Ocean Mini-Course. That's where students from around the world introduce themselves and find teammates.

Yes. Every member of your team registers individually, so we have everyone's details.

When it comes to submitting, though, your team sends one pitch between you. Whoever submits it lists every team member's name on the submission form. Don't submit separately for each person.

Yes, and there's nothing you need to do about it.

Your registration doesn't lock you into competing alone or as a team. What counts is the submission form: whatever you enter there is what we treat as final. If you registered alone and end up with a team, list everyone on the submission form. If you registered as a team and end up going solo, just submit on your own.

The only thing to remember is that everyone competing needs to have registered at some point, so if teammates join you later, make sure they register too.

Yes. From the moment you register you can say you're taking part in the Blue Ocean Student Entrepreneur Competition, and you can list the Blue Ocean Mini-Course and the certificate of completion you get for finishing it.

Once you submit your pitch, you'll receive a Certificate of Participation, and students who place in the competition receive a Certificate of Recognition. Those come after the winners are announced in May.

Blue ocean strategy is usually taught at university level, so having studied it in high school sets you apart. And because students from across the world compete, admissions officers recognise it as an international competition rather than a local one.

No problem. By registering for the competition, you will get access to valuable resources to help you come up with a blue ocean idea. Immediately upon registering you will get access to the Blue Ocean Mini-Course, which will teach you the fundamentals of blue ocean strategy and how to develop your pitch. You will get a certificate of completion, which will boost your resume.

No. Any idea is a great idea. In fact, technology innovation only counts when linked to buyer value. Read this blog to learn the difference between technology innovation and value innovation.

If your idea does propose new technology, what would make your pitch stand out is to provide some proof of how that's going to happen. Some scientific research, or a reference to scientific research, would be useful. If your idea isn't dependent on technology, you don't need that. Take Comic Relief, a charity where you just ask people to wear red noses. They have generated billions in charity for that, with no technology whatsoever involved.

You don't have to know if it works in order to submit it. But the closer you can get to it, the better. Market research is about the need for the product — creating a prototype and asking people about their interest in it. You'll never know if something works until you produce a product and put it in the market. But we want you to actually think about it, and what you're doing is creating the idea. What kinds of things can you do? How far can you take it?

The last piece is doing research. If you have an idea and it doesn't exist today, the amount of research we get back in terms of components of the idea that do exist is amazing. The more that you can share, the more feasible it is, and the higher your score will be.

Blue ocean businesses don't necessarily depend on technology, so you can come up with great ideas that involve no new technology. Don't feel like it has to have some high-tech technology that you do not have. Ideally, the technology was there all the time and all you're doing is creating something very useful that nobody ever thought of using. Pitches can be for-profit or non-profit.

If you are using scientific research, it may be a good idea to just put it on the page where you are talking about it. If you are working from a slideshow and talking over it, the citation can sit at the bottom of that slide. The most important finding that's relevant to you should be up there on the slide, with the citation underneath it.

It can be invented, or it could be existing as well, as long as it meets the criteria — a leap in value for buyers, delivered at a cost the business can actually sustain. This is one way we're different from other pitch competitions: at times others require that you have not just the idea but a business around it. Here you can compete with the concept and idea alone, as long as you can build a business model around it and show how that business would succeed, whether for-profit or non-profit.

You also don't need a working prototype. But the further forward you go with your idea and what you can pitch to the judges, the higher your chances of winning. If you have made a prototype, or even a mock-up, showing it in your pitch increases your chances.

Keep each pitch to one idea. You only have five minutes, and for each product you need to show who the competitors are, how you're different, and why it would work — you can't do justice to two in that time.

If you have more than one idea, you're welcome to submit more than one pitch. But we'd recommend focusing on one and making it great.

Yes. AI is a tool like any other, and using it won't count against you. You don't need to declare it.

Where it helps is in building things: coding your platform, designing an app, producing visuals, running research, tidying up your script. Use it as much as you like for any of that.

Where it doesn't help is in coming up with the idea itself. Your pitch is judged by human beings who watch thousands of them, and they can tell the difference between an idea someone has genuinely thought through and one that was handed to them. An AI-generated idea tends to be generic, and generic ideas don't place. The thinking — why this problem, why this approach, why nobody has done it this way — has to be yours.

No, but you're welcome to. We offer a Blue Ocean Student Entrepreneurs Mini-Course that provides an overview of the blue ocean concepts. To stand a chance of winning this competition, you'll need to be familiar with, and use, some of the blue ocean strategy tools and frameworks such as the Strategy Canvas, Three Tiers of Noncustomers, Buyer Utility Map, and Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create Grid. By reading the books you will have a better understanding of blue ocean strategy and how to apply it to your novel idea. The books are full of inspiring examples as well!

Past competitors who placed highly in the competition have all read the books.

Your pitch should be 3-5 minutes long. Shorter or longer pitches get disqualified, so check the length before you upload.

Videos must be presented at normal playback speed. Artificially speeding up the audio or video to fit within the 5-minute limit is not allowed and may result in disqualification.

All pitches must be in English.

Remember that you're not being judged on the quality of sound; it just needs to be something we can hear. Most participants use their computer or their phone to record the audio, some with a microphone. It is very rarely an issue if you use normal filming or recording devices such as your computer or phone.

Your pitch needs to meet all of these before you submit:

• You've registered for the competition.
• You've completed the online Blue Ocean Mini-Course. The access link was sent to you by email when you registered.
• Your pitch follows the guidelines in the blue ocean pitch template.
• You've used blue ocean tools and frameworks to describe your entrepreneurial idea. You do not stand a chance to win if you have not.
• You've uploaded your video to YouTube with the hashtag #blueoceancompetition.
• Your video is 3-5 minutes long. Shorter or longer pitches get disqualified.
• Your video file is in one of these formats: mp4, qt, webm, mov, wmv, flv.
• Your video file is named after your own product or idea. If your product is called SolarSip, name the file SolarSip.mp4. Don't submit files called Untitled.mp4, FinalVersion2.mov, or anything else that doesn't identify your idea.
• Your video file is under 1 GB. Larger files cannot be uploaded.
• If you're working with a team, you're submitting only one entry for the team. You'll be asked to enter your team members' names on the submission form.

You can check all of this and submit at blueoceancompetition.org/submit.

Upload your pitch to YouTube with the hashtag #blueoceancompetition, then include the link to your published video when you submit on the pitch submission form.

Your video file must be under 5 minutes and under 1 GB. There's no set format — voice-over animation, graphics, or talking to camera all work — though we encourage you to use the templates provided to structure your pitch, which will increase your chances of winning.

You submit once. Pitches received after the submission deadline will not be accepted.

Our judges are seasoned entrepreneurs and businesspeople from around the world who will evaluate the pitches based on the competition criteria.

Each pitch is watched by multiple judges, and judges are assigned pitches at random. They assess every pitch against the same scoring criteria, which are published so you can see exactly what you're being marked on.

Individual and team pitches are judged in exactly the same way, against those same criteria.

No. We receive thousands of pitches each year, so we aren't able to give individual feedback on any of them.

What you can do instead is look at the criteria the judges use, which are published on our Resources page. They tell you what each pitch is assessed on, so you can see where yours was strong and where it wasn't.

We start by choosing the Top 500 and Top 100 pitches, then narrow to the Top 30, then the Top 10, and then announce the winners. Each round takes roughly one to two weeks.

You submit once and are automatically considered in every round — there's nothing further to send. You can see this year's dates on the competition timeline.

First place wins $1,000, second place $750, and third place $500.

There's also a People's Choice Award of $750. Only Top 100 pitches are eligible. Once the Top 100 is announced, we upload those pitches to the Blue Ocean Competition YouTube channel and let you know when voting opens. The winner is chosen based on engagement with the video, including likes, comments and shares.

Your Blue Ocean Mini-Course certificate of completion arrives as soon as you finish the course.

Every other certificate, including Certificates of Participation and Certificates of Recognition, is awarded once the winners are announced in May.

Yes. You upload your pitch to YouTube yourself as part of submitting it, so it's public from that point.

If you make the Top 100, we also upload your pitch to the Blue Ocean Competition YouTube channel, and we'll let you know when that happens.