Now in its fourth edition, Innovation Labs it started last weekend, with 42 teams and over 100 students lining up at the start to present their ideas to the jury that has the power to turn them into businesses worth millions of euros.
Supported by Orange, Carrefour and the Romanian-American Foundation, Innovation Labs 2016 has put talented students face to face with entrepreneurs or successful managers who will guide 24 of the remaining teams in the competition to turn their ideas into successful businesses.
Hackathon
Although Innovation Labs 2016 started in Bucharest, it is also organized in Cluj and, for the first time, in Sibiu and Timisoara. The winners from each city have the chance to get in touch with local investors to develop their ideas.
Exactly as in previous years Innovation Labs 2016 started with one hackathon which was composed of a short presentation of the ideas in front of the jury and the guests, the teams then having a whole night to make a preliminary presentation of the idea, based on which the judging and selection of the teams that now participate in a 3-month mentorship program.
This year Innovation Labs was segmented into 4 main categories: Agriculture, Retail, Cyber Security si Health & Lifestyle. Of the 42 teams that started the competition on Saturday, only 24 were chosen to go further in the training and mentorship program.
What caught my attention
Of all the 42 teams that were present, a few caught my attention, mainly thanks to the problems they are trying to solve.
The first of them is called Reta aims to develop a system of location inside buildingsSimilar to what Apple was developing at the moment, it is mainly focused on shopping centers where users would be directed through the stores and would receive personalized offers.
The second calls Beenocular, is from the field of agriculture and proposes a monitoring solution for beekeepers, who will receive alerts and notifications in case the bees are sick, or when there is a lot of activity.
Closet Door is another interesting system that aims to help us choose our wardrobe more easily using existing information in our accounts available in various social networks, or those about the weather, everything being thought to make our lives easier.
Separately, there are many interesting ideas for monitoring cars and putting drivers in contact to solve their traffic problems, the development of security solutions aimed at better protecting data in various online storage media, an online platform for registering restaurant reservations and providing feedback for services, or even a fishing application that notifies users when the fish bites the bait.
Orange help
For all those involved in Innovation Labs 2016 the company Orange provides its internet services through access to mobile Wi-Fi hotspots installed in public transport (and access to the APIs of these hotspots), access to the APIs for sending SMS through its own network, kits IoT including SIMs with data and SMS traffic and access to the IoT Datavenue platform of the Orange group, access to cloud services for running web applications and much, much more.
Apart from all this, the participants have the opportunity to be mentored by the CCO of Orange Romania, Julien Ducarroz, the general manager of Carrefour, Jean-Baptiste Dernoncourt, the founder Vector Watch, the director for IT development within Microsoft and many other important personalities from the Romanian IT field.
In 2014, I participated in the first edition of Innovation Labs and I told you that Orange was fully involved to help young Romanians transform simple ideas into businesses that can change the world and I'm glad that their project continues.
Innovation Labs is the best chance that students, without experience and access to mentors or funds, have to develop their ideas, and projects of this kind must be supported because they honor a Romania that is full of extremely talented people and with great ideas.
