Second edition of the EUNICE Imagine Innovation Cup - summary
The EUNICE Imagine Innovation Cup is a competition for the best start-up concept involving students from various EUNICE partner universities. This year we completed the second edition of this event. The first stage of the competition took place locally at each of the partner universities, with the final event taking place in beautiful Santander, Spain.
Teams that qualified for the final at the local level competed against each other, presenting their innovative business ideas to a jury. The jury consisted of five professors from EUNICE partner universities and two entrepreneurs and industry experts from Spain. They assessed each project in terms of sustainability, feasibility, innovation, attractiveness to stakeholders and the quality of the presentation during the final.
On the podium were teams from Finland, Sweden and Poland.
The winning project
The team from the University of Vaasa (Finland) won first place with an innovative business plan called Unicore. Their concept is to improve the accuracy of navigation in various sectors, such as logistics and maritime navigation, by placing a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit that provide positioning, navigation and timing services.
A team from the Poznan University of Technology presented the AndanteCaps project on so-called supercapacitors (SCs). Traditional lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) are no longer an efficient enough solution for energy storage due to their moderate longevity (hundreds of cycles) and long charging process (hours). Supercapacitors (SCs) are nearly “immortal” (up to millions of cycles) and can be charged quickly (in seconds), but only store a fraction of the LIB's energy. AndanteCaps proposes a solution based on lithium-ion capacitors (LICs), which combine the advantages of SCs and LIBs. Their design simplifies the process of assembling the cells, cuts costs (by half), improves energy and power characteristics, and remains 'green'.
We congratulate the winners and our amazing team and look forward to the next edition of the competition.
