<aside> 👋 Hey There! Welcome to the Catalyst Ingenium 2026 Track Guide! This page is designed to help you and your teammates decide which track is right for you!

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🏛️ This Year's Tracks

Fundamentum: Case Research

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🔍 Fundamentum is the foundations track. We want you to take a real, messy, specific problem and understand it more deeply than anyone else in the room; then build something grounded in that understanding. This track rewards rigour, primary sources, and defensible judgment over polish. Recommended for those who like getting their hands dirty with a problem before touching a keyboard.

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Anyone can describe a problem. Far fewer can show they've investigated one. That's the bar here.

The difference between a real solution and a plausible-sounding one is the legwork underneath it, the sources you actually read, the people you actually spoke to, the assumptions you tested and threw away. That work can't be a shortcut, and this track is built to make it visible.

Your job is to investigate one problem properly, and build something your research, not your intuition, tells you is right.

Where to Start

Do the groundwork before you write a line of code:

• Talk to real people affected by the problem. Record what surprised you.
• Read primary sources: reports, data, first-hand accounts, not summaries of them.
• Find existing attempts at this problem. Understand specifically why they fell short.
• Write down the assumption you started with and how your research changed it.

What to Submit

• A working prototype grounded in your findings.
• A research trail: your actual sources, notes, and interview records, the evidence of the journey, not a tidy summary of it.
• A video pitch walking us through the problem, what your research uncovered, and the specific decisions that came from that research.

More Information

We have a more comprehensive explanation page on this track, and potential directions, so go ahead and check it out!