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33 DUT Excellence 2025 | Semester 1Pictured: Dr Pinkie Ntola, Interim Director of Technology, Transfer and Innovation at DUT.DUT, for you to be able to shine. This competition is at our home ground, so we need to take advantage. We will judge you by what you produce, not what you say. We look forward to using your products, and the ground is fertile for you to show what you are made of,%u201d shared Prof Maladzhi.Ms Nontokozo Ngcobo, innobiz DUT Centre Manager, shared a detailed eligibility criteria breakdown for entrance and participation in the competition, including that student entrepreneurs needed to be fully registered students with the University or an alumni within the last five years.Ms Ngcobo explained that the start-up needed to ensure that it had a team, which could be created from a variety of students from within the University.%u201cYou must implement a structured team, detailing who is responsible for the different aspects of the business, including marketing, finance and legal. As a small business, those are the processes and systems that we emphasise that you implement so that the business grows sustainably,%u201d Ms Ngcobo said.Further competition eligibility criteria and regulations will be posted on the DUT and innobiz websites.The launch also saw two student entrepreneurs, Mr Luyanda Majozi, the founder of hip streetwear fashion brand Enigmatic Cotton and Ms Nompumelelo Ngcobo, founder of Oluhlaza Energy, who participated in the competition in 2024, both share their journey in the competition.%u201cWe had sleepless nights preparing for our pitch and our presentation. We also had to work on streamlining our competition. We were prepared to excel with the assistance of innobiz DUT through mentorship programmes and training on how to prepare our pitch deck. This helped us to make it to the finals,%u201d Ms Nompumelelo Ngcobo said.Mr Majozi, who won second place and a whopping R65 000 prize money in the Start-up Category in 2024, explained that his journey with GISU was long and tough but based on how he was %u2018cooked%u2019 by the innobiz DUT team, he navigated the competition with confidence.%u201cI am an incubatee at innobiz and at the time, I was ready for any competition as I had come back from the EDHE Intervarsity National Finals in 2023 where I was a finalist, and came close to taking the R100 000 cheque,%u201d Majozi said.This setback spurred him on to put his best effort into the competition to make it a resounding success.In closing, Dr Farai Dziike, a Technology, Transfer and Commercialisation Specialist at DUT, thanked Mr Steven Farr for facilitating the engagements and DUT leadership for ensuring that DUT students are creative, innovative, entrepreneurial and adaptive to the changes in the world. He applauded DUT for ensuring that its students work towards becoming job creators instead of job seekers.Simangele Zuma/Samkelo Mtshali