LaunchX Innovation Program Partners with Milwaukee Tech Hub Coalition to Tackle Major Industry Challenge

How do we retain mid-career tech talent?

That was the pressing question posed to high school students from around the world during this year’s LaunchX Online Summer Innovation Program. Acting as real-world consultants, Launchies spent three intensive weeks partnering with the Milwaukee Tech Hub Coalition (MKE Tech Hub) to investigate, ideate, and pitch actionable solutions to one of the tech industry's most stubborn problems.

This year’s program marked a significant, highly successful structural shift for LaunchX, resulting in deeper learning, unprecedented partner engagement, and incredibly sophisticated student pitches.

A Strategic Shift: One Partner For Endless Possibilities

In past years, the Innovation Program placed each team with a different company. While this offered a wide breadth of projects, it presented logistical challenges and required a generalized curriculum to accommodate 20+ different industries and problems. Furthermore, Launchies couldn't always be placed on a project that aligned with their specific interests, meaning a marketing-minded student might end up working on a purely product-based problem due to capacity limits.

This summer, LaunchX pivoted by partnering exclusively with the Milwaukee Tech Hub Coalition and focusing the entire cohort on a single, complex problem, the program unlocked a new level of depth.

"We solved all of those logistical issues by working with one partner," shared Forest Richter, President of LaunchX. "Students were able to approach their solution to the problem in any way they chose. A more marketing-focused team pitched something around communications, while other teams pitched programs and software. We were able to really drill down into the problem and have much more sophisticated conversations and lectures with our students."

The shift was equally beneficial for the MKE Tech Hub. Instead of a standard student project, the coalition received 20 distinct, highly researched potential solutions to a real problem their member organizations are facing today. Because the output was genuinely valuable, the partner was deeply invested in answering student inquiries and guiding their research.

Real-World Research at Summerfest Tech

The partnership went far beyond standard classroom Q&As. The final week of the Innovation Program happened to overlap with Summerfest Tech, a major annual technology event in Milwaukee.

Led by Executive Director Joe Poeschl who brought his own extensive background in running collegiate entrepreneurship programs in Wisconsin, the MKE Tech Hub team took student engagement to the next level. Instead of simply typing out asynchronous replies to the students' questions, the Tech Hub team walked the floor at Summerfest Tech. They recorded themselves asking representatives from various constituent companies the exact questions the LaunchX students had posed. This on-the-ground reporting gave students a front-row seat to the real-world impact of the mid-career talent drain, directly informing their final pitches.

Demo Day: 20 Unique Angles to One Massive Problem

Because the entire cohort was addressing the exact same prompt, Demo Day took on a unique, fast-paced velocity. The judging panel consisted of leadership from the Milwaukee Tech Hub alongside local tech constituents.

The proposed solutions showcased incredible variety:

• The Human Element: Some teams focused on relationship-building through mentorship, community initiatives, gamification, and incentive structures.
• Career Pathways: Others designed internal and external rotational programs to provide mid-career employees with more interesting, varied tasks.
• Custom Software: Several teams built specialized software and platforms designed specifically to monitor and boost retention.
• The Creative Standout: One team hypothesized that relocating to a new job becomes a much tougher task when an employee has to sacrifice a low housing rate. Their solution was corporate-subsidized mortgages to tie talent to the local ecosystem. LaunchX leadership noted this as one of the most impressively creative lines of thinking of the day.

Empowering the Next Generation of Consultants

The Online Summer Innovation Program is designed to give high school students the opportunity to step out of the classroom and into the boardroom. By partnering with a company to understand and solve a real business challenge, LaunchX proves that young minds are capable of delivering professional-grade consulting.

As this year's partnership with the Milwaukee Tech Hub Coalition proved, high schoolers are ready to tackle the tech industry's bottlenecks and deliver robust solutions that leave a lasting mark.