The 2017 Elisa Innovation Challenge has reached the final stage. The three teams who made it to the final share a creative knack for connecting the business world’s needs and consumers’ desires. The competition will culminate with the announcement of the winner at Slush.
The Elisa Innovation Challenge, now in its third year, has advanced to the final stage, for which the three best teams of the ten semifinalists have been chosen. The competition looks for successful new innovations in the areas of the Internet of Things, Industrial Internet and smart homes. The brief this year was to create a new smart product or service to solve businesses’ or individuals’ everyday problems.
The finalists were selected on 28 September at the Elisa Pitching Competition, at which semifinalists presented their ideas and their results from the six-week product development phase, which had started in early August, to the jury.
The finalists selected were the Finnish teams Humia and IqBox and the Swiss team Parquery. What the three finalist teams’ ideas had in common was solutions for both businesses’ and individuals’ problems.
– This year the Challenge had quite an open brief, and this produced some extremely high-level innovation. The three finalist teams set their sights on the business world, but at the same time they brought smart technology to homes and consumers’ everyday lives. These startups have the ingredients for international success and we are proud that we can be involved in accelerating their growth story, says Kimmo Pentikäinen, Vice President, Business Development, who is responsible for startup partnerships at Elisa.
In addition to the Elisa business management, the jury that selected the finalists included serial startup entrepreneur, Pivot5 founder and investor Inka Mero and Lifeline Ventures partner and investor Juha Lindfors, who have helped numerous startups grow.
– Making the international success of innovative startups possible is an important part of Elisa’s development as a recognised international provider of digital services. The positive effects of our Challenge are already very visible. Emergence, the winners of our IoT Challenge last year, has just raised €1.3m for international expansion and the semifinalist Spectral Engines has won a European innovation award worth €800,000, Kimmo Pentikäinen says.
The Elisa Innovation Challenge 2017 began on 9 May 2017 with an ideas-gathering stage. The jury reviewed all proposals submitted before 28 June and chose ten teams for the semifinal, which began on 9 August. Taking part in the semifinal were six teams from Finland, two from Israel, one from Switzerland and one German-Slovenian team.
The Challenge will culminate in late November-early December at Slush in the Helsinki Convention Centre, when the finalists will pitch their ideas to the jury once more. The winning team will be awarded a grand prize of €50,000. The winner will also get to take part in the Slush 100 Pitching Competition.
The Elisa Innovation Challenge 2017 finalists
Competition description and terms: elisa.fi/innovation-challenge/
Humia
Humia is a completely wireless and automatic structural humidity monitoring system which makes detecting and monitoring humidity and mould problems easy and cheap in private homes, business premises and public buildings. During the Challenge, the team has created a cloud service to support the wireless humidity detector it developed, which makes monitoring structural humidity and temperature possible. The service detects hidden and sudden problems before damage becomes widespread.
IqBox
IqBox aims to solve the last mile problem of fresh food deliveries so that the customer does not need to be at home to take the delivery. During the Challenge, the team has developed a cloud service and two remote-controlled prototypes for outdoor, heat-controlled post boxes, where food can be delivered and remain fresh until the customer picks it up. The post box can be cooled or heated in advance depending on the food to be delivered. The solution can be modified for use in both urban and rural areas.
Parquery
Parquery is a new kind of machine-vision and machine-learning smart parking solution which identifies vacant parking spaces from any camera images with the help of an automatic cloud service. The database could consist, for example, of city street or car park surveillance cameras, which the service analyses and sends the data from them to smart transport operators, companies and cities. The machine-vision based service could be expanded to follow city traffic volumes, public transport passenger numbers or shopping centre customer flows.
Previous winners:
Elisa Innovation Challenge 2015:
Foller: hub.elisa.fi/ruuan-havikkia-vahentava-foller-voitti-elisan-iot-kilpailun/
Elisa Innovation Challenge 2016:
Emergence: hub.elisa.fi/emergence-voitti-elisa-iot-innovation-challenge-kilpailun/
Lukoton: yksityisille.hub.elisa.fi/slush2016-avaimet-puhelimeen/
Further information:
Send further questions to: [email protected]
IoT innovation for corporate customers:
Jukka Nurmi, Director, IoT Sales, Elisa, tel. +358 50 506 2006, [email protected]
IoT innovations for consumer customers:
Matias Castrén, Business Director, Broadband Subscription, tel. +358 50 669 06, [email protected]
Elisa startup partnerships:
Kimmo Pentikäinen, Vice President, Business Development, tel. +358 50 506 5412, [email protected]
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Elisa IoT is an open development and service platform that makes the development of various IoT services and networked devices agile, fast and secure. Codeless tools, open interfaces and real-time visualisation allow ideas to be turned into products and business much faster than traditional IT projects. The Elisa IoT ecosystem is a network of expert companies that offers expertise in areas from application development and hardware solutions to intelligent analytics. www.elisa.com/iot
Elisa is a telecommunications, ICT and online service company serving 2.3 million consumer, corporate and public administration organisation customers. Elisa provides environmentally sustainable services for communication and entertainment, and tools for organisations to digitalise their operations and improve productivity. In Finland, Elisa is the market leader in its field. Cooperation with Vodafone and Telenor enables globally competitive services. Elisa is listed on Nasdaq Helsinki Large Cap with approximately 200,000 shareholders. In 2016, Elisa’s revenue was 1.64 billion euros, and the company employed 4,300 people. www.elisa.com
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