The European Hopes for Innovation
Designed for students and researchers in Europe’s universities and higher education establishments with innovative projects, the 7th European Hopes for Innovation Trophies finally went to four laureates instead of the originally planned and habitual number of three. These came from amongst the 28 pre-selected candidates who were present in the European pavilion at Innovact.
Every year, these prizes are awarded to the three best projects received, but for this edition, the remarkable quality of the candidates and the intensity of the debates prompted jury president Luuk Borg to spontaneously propose a further €1,000 in prize money for a 4th candidate! Judged on the boldness, creativity, viability and professionalism of their projects, the laureates were awarded their prizes by the President of the Jury, Luuk Borg, director of the General Secretariat of Eureka and head of the European financing programme Eurostars.
1st prize : Artificial Skin (Russia)
Luuk Borg presented €3,000 to Olivia Oganezova and Pavlovskiy Sergey of the Russian State Medical University for its Artificial Skin project.
In order to produce skin artificially for severe burn victims, this student in the 1st year of her doctorate aims to create an enterprise, which will produce an innovative bio-material: spider’s web silk synthesized using techniques developed from the science of genetics. This technology will offer numerous advantages: very light, extremely strong and elastic, it is biocompatible and enables grafts and skin and human cell reformation with cicatrisation in 7 to 10 days instead of the current time scale of 22 to 25 days. This will reduce the duration and costs of hospitalization and will improve patients’ quality of life.
2nd prize: salt-water solar distillation unit (France)
The prize of €1,500 was awarded to Nicolas Beauquis of IUT 1 Grenoble (energy and thermal engineering department) and fellow team members Lionel Cartier of ISAT Nevers and Corentin Chambe of IUT 1 Grenoble.
Their mobile system of brackish water purification by solar distillation is designed to operate in poor countries where, apart from solar energy, electricity and energy are not necessarily available. This is a prototype, which operates in a free and autonomous manner. The solar water distillation unit operates using two phenomena – evaporation and condensation. The water is purified without having to pay for energy.
3rd prize : Effilux (France)
Nicolas Mathieu of the Institut d’Optique Graduate School also received €1,500 for the Effilux project, which he works on with other students (Jean-Philippe Blanchot, Arnaud Mestivier) and one of the Institutes teacher-researchers (Jacques Sabater).
The Institut d’Optique team wants to create the Effilux company in the first half of 2009 and previously registered a patent in December 2008. The product developed by Effilux is an innovative optic combination which enables the optimisation of the recovery of light emitted by LEDs. This means Effilux uses fewer LEDs than other technologies for the same level of lighting.
Special Eureka prize: Portable hypersonic water purification (Greece)
This year, Eureka devoted a special prize of €1,000 to one of the projects presented in the competition: «Portable hypersonic water purification» by Michaël Arvanitis and Paris Paraskevopoulos, of the University of Patras.