Top prizes for connected home, connected health and connected learning
Last Month I was at our Paris-Saclay campus to participate in the final of the Nokia Open Innovation Challenge – a competition which looks for the next big ideas in Internet of Things domains including public safety, connected automotive, industry 4.0, digital health, utilities, security and smart cities. This is an event we hold in partnership with Nokia Growth Partners, the venture capital arm of Nokia.
Our 12 finalists – who were selected from more than 400 applications – had flown in from around the world and spent two days in workshops with Nokia mentors to finetune their business plan. During the final pitching and demo event on Friday they presented their business plans and the Nokia jury then deliberated on the winners.
The overall winner of the challenge was CUJO for their firewall for the connected home, designed to bring business-level security to the home network. The second prize and investors’ choice prize were awarded to iSono Health, who empower people to take charge of their health with early breast cancer detection. The third prize was awarded to Mobagel for their Decanter™ Big Data AI engine which automatically chooses the optimal machine learning model and provides the right actionable insights for marketers and executives. For a complete list of the finalists, read our press release.
Congratulations to all the winners of the 2016 Nokia Open Innovation Challenge
We’ve also seen a number of artificial intelligence companies, with whom we may be able to enhance our own products and drive more efficiency in our network operations.
Out of twelve outstanding finalists we selected three winners with whom we will start working immediately on joint activities. We will also explore how we can integrate all finalists closer to Nokia’s products and solutions and, as our ultimate goal, how can we go to market together.
With so many diverse opportunities, it’s essential to keep an open mind but also determine the best way forward for each specific case. But based on my observations during the challenge, I’m confident that with these finalists, we have great opportunities in front us to accelerate IoT ideas to a wider market.
Nokia Open Innovation Challenge seeks innovators and start ups that can help us make the world a better place for people. We believe we can do that through technology but we also believe that we need to do this through an open ecosystem, where we can bring in people with creative ideas and smart solutions. Co-innovation with the ecosystem is essential and a key part of our strategy.
This is the fourth, and I think best, edition of this event so far. We had a huge number of applications and the quality of the finalists was very high. We see a lot of applicants focused on areas that can really improve people’s lives and make industries more efficient. We see applications we can use in smart cities to analyze people’s behaviors but also very focused applications, for example in video analytics, which could be useful in our industry.
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