Ignite Your Passion with LaunchX

For over a decade, LaunchX has been empowering students with the skills and mindset they need to build and run thriving companies. The organisation has earned renown for its signature summer programme, which prepares young entrepreneurs from around the world for real-world success in the global market. We heard more below from Thomas Clapper, Head of Marketing and Product, as LaunchX is named the Best Youth Entrepreneurship Programme 2026 in the Corporate Excellence Awards 2026.

LaunchX was founded in 2012 with the aim of offering a full spectrum of educational experiences to passionate youth entrepreneurs around the world, empowering them to change the world they live in through action. The company runs entrepreneurship programmes for young people, online and in-person on university campuses, driven by the simple vision of youth everywhere developing entrepreneurial mindsets and practical skills within a lasting community of likeminded people. 

This is a mission guided by four core values: Grow Together, Win Together promotes breaking down silos and empowering others the way the team wishes to be empowered themselves; Question the Old, Build the New, encourages remaining curious, testing ideas, and taking smart risks; Control the Variables means that the team owns what it can influence, measuring and refining every detail; and Bring Your Heart, bringing real passion to the work while making space for fun.

What began as a summer programme held at MIT has evolved into a comprehensive ecosystem of experiences, comprising a free introductory course, an online BootCamp, flagship entrepreneurship programmes over the summer, an Innovation programme wherein teams solve real problems for real business, AwardX competitions that are free to enter, and the beyondX Conference. Through these industry-leading endeavours, students spend weeks working with industry experts and learning to solve problems in meaningful and viable ways.

Rather than merely writing a business plan, students are encouraged and enabled to start a real company. Every team within the Flagship programme is tasked to enter the market and produce at least $250 in genuine revenue or pre-sales a week before Demo Day. This is a deliberately modest and deliberately real number, chosen to demonstrate the true difference between a student who has an idea and a student who has a customer.

“We refuse to let entrepreneurship stay theoretical,” Thomas told us. “A lot of youth programmes end at the pitch. Ours ends at the sale. The $250 revenue requirement is the clearest expression of that, but the same idea runs through everything we do: forming a team, testing a minimum viable product with actual users, and then selling to them.”

What’s more, LaunchX does not define student success by how many surviving companies emerge from a summer. Instead, it measures the creation of its young entrepreneurs; a student whose company folds but now spots opportunities, prototypes, tests with users, and pitches with ease is a success. As Thomas shared, “Companies are an outcome. The mindset is the product.”

A shining example of student success was demonstrated by Bailey Cherry, a participant in LaunchX’s 2021 class who is now taking the world of sustainable children’s literature by storm. Leveraging her lifelong passion for books, Bailey began to reimagine what could be done with the beloved books from her childhood. She took the simple notion of sharing old books and transformed it into ReBooked, a groundbreaking platform for reusing preloved children’s books.

She brought her entrepreneurship to LaunchX, spending a summer learning within a setting that emulated the real-world startup environment. Over the course of the five-week programme, Bailey and her team launched EcoGo, a one-stop platform for sustainable products for users across Hong Kong. 

Today, ReBooked is Hong Kong’s largest second-hand bookstore for children’s books. The business has now collected more than 200,000 books, resold 45,000, and given away more than 40,000. Bailey has successfully taken the platform to a global stage, launching franchises in Turkey and Brazil, as well as outreach programmes in the Philippines.

Reflecting back on the experience, Bailey shared, “The intensity and rigor of LaunchX – the short time frame you are given to create and launch something – pushes you to produce high-quality work. It’s like a crash course in real-world problem solving and critical thinking.” She added, “You have to be open to different options and go with the flow. Things might not go as planned, but you adapt and learn from it.”

This is an ethos championed wholeheartedly across LaunchX’s programmes. The team leans heavily on its Control the Variables value: tracking the parts of the experience that can be influenced, reviewing every cycle honestly in a post mortem, and altering the programme based on data insights. Goals are written down, remain visible to the whole team, and are each tied back to the student outcome it is supposed to produce. If a piece of work cannot be traced to that, then it is a sign that it should not be done.

LaunchX operates as two groups working closely together. A core team owns the backend structure of the company, and a flex team of contractors, part-time staff, and interns scales up around programme seasons. Every summer, the company introduces a summer team of instructors and interns, meaning that people are constantly being onboarded into the company’s culture. This requires the LaunchX team to remain explicit in its expectations, ensuring that every member of the team operates on the same page from day one.

“Grow Together, Win Together carries the most weight day to day,” said Thomas. “It is a direct instruction to break down silos. Marketing does not hand off to admissions and walk away. Product does not build in isolation from the people who teach the programmes. Bring Your Heart is the other half. We work with teenagers who are taking on a genuine risk by putting an idea in front of strangers, and that does not survive a cynical room. We hire for people who care.”

This approach has enabled LaunchX to propel itself to the forefront of the industry, though this leading spot has not come without its own unique challenges. Primarily, the demand for LaunchX grew faster than its infrastructure. Over the last 12 months, applications ran well ahead of what had been projected. Whilst this is predominantly an advantageous position to maintain, it caused significant strain on systems within LaunchX that were not designed for such volume.

Specifically, the two moments that matter most in a family’s decision – the offer and the tuition payment – were running on form infrastructure. “It worked in the narrow sense that students enrolled and payments arrived,” Thomas explained. “But it was unsegmented, hard to measure, and largely invisible to the guardian who is actually paying. We were winning demand and then handing it to a system that could not tell us much about what happened next.”

LaunchX overcame this obstacle by refusing to simply patch the problem again, instead naming it as a product problem. Now, the team is building LXos, a single operating system that carries a person from applicant to student to alum in one account, replacing both the application portal and the admissions portal with one account per person. Offering one comprehensive system for students, guardians, and alums alike, the first live cycle of LXos will begin with LaunchX’s 2027 summer intake.

Whilst LXos is the biggest development within LaunchX’s pipeline, the company is also focusing on a number of additional projects for the upcoming years. LaunchX is expanding AwardX, a free global entrepreneurship competition targeting high school and university students who currently run a company or have a well-developed business idea they wish to pitch. LaunchX is now broadening the reach of the free-to-enter competition, running editions in Kenya, across Europe, and internationally this year.

This coming spring, LaunchX will run its first in-person international programme, a LaunchX BootCamp+ in Türkiye. In partnership with LeadUp Global, the company will pair an online course with a four-day in-person sprint that finishes at the beyondX Conference and Demo Day. The team is also filming course content in Europe this autumn, which will enable LaunchX to deliver the same quality education without requiring a student to fly.

Developments are also underway for the EshipX Marketplace project. This platform helps young founders actually launch and sell their products, tying straight back to the $250 requirement by addressing the very real problem of young entrepreneurs with a finished product and no means of distribution. Users can easily introduce their unique brand to the market, tell their story, showcase their products, and take their entrepreneurship to the next level.

“On depth, we want a student to be able to stay with us,” Thomas shared. “Today someone can finish a summer programme and then fall off the map. LXos is the foundation for fixing that, because one account per person means we can see and serve a whole journey rather than a single transaction.

“Alongside it, we are building out an accelerator for the students who are ready to keep going, and the Marketplace so they have somewhere to sell. A student who finds us at 15 through a free competition should be able to keep going with us for years, and at no point should the next step be unclear.” Guiding students every step of the way, LaunchX ensures its students future’s are bright. In turn, this accolade-worthy company is sure to continue achieving more for the years to come.

Contact Details

Contact: Thomas Clapper

Company: LaunchX

Web Address: www.launchx.com