Challenge HACK4TOMORROW: Innovate to transform the world of tomorrow!

Organized last March by EPF’s department of Master of Science ICE (Innovation, Creation & Entrepreneurship) and SCBS, the HACK4TOMORROW challenge, aimed at 3rd and 4th year EPF students from the three campuses, offered an immersion in the research of innovative products and services. The purpose of the challenge? Imagine an innovative and technical project with viable market potential and a business model. The aim of this competition, launched by the MSc's pedagogic directors, was to introduce this double degree program to the students of EPF’s engineering program, to challenge them and, eventually, trigger some entrepreneurial vocations!

This challenge that took place under the theme "Transforming the world of tomorrow" left a lot of room for the creativity and personal preference of each of the participants who had the opportunity to introduce an innovative concept wether it was in the area of business creation, health, or the humanitarian, societal, environmental or digital fields! Several teams or individual participants competed to hope to win the €500 prize and the opportunity to be accompanied by the Young Entrepreneur Center, the incubator of the Technopole de l'Aube.

Julien Gardan, teacher-researcher and director of the program explains that: "The objective of this challenge in the first place is to attract the engineering students to the ICE master’s degree and possibly ignite the students’ interest to entrepreneurship. We had interesting projects and original ideas. The students played the game to the end; they really imagined how the project would be integrated into the market and the industrial target, and this, in 3 weeks. All the projects submitted to us were evaluated as feasible and commercially viable products. We are therefore very satisfied with the work that has been provided by all the participants."

Landfill Hunt, or an innovative way to clean the planet!

The winner of this first edition of the Hack4tomorrow Challenge is Axel SILVERIO and his project Landfill Hunt. Axel, 3rd year engineering student at the Montpellier campus, has distinguished himself by his project’s originality and societal and environmental impact.

His idea? Create an application that will list open air waste areas by inviting users to upload waste images via the app and share them afterwards with the app’s virtual community. The photos would be geolocated, shared in the newsfeed of the application and referenced on an interactive map in order to visualize the split of total waste. The purpose of the application is to list these photos of open air waste areas to offer directly to users through the app, days of land clearance through associations and local communities. In addition, this platform will make it possible to determine the quantity and the size of the different urban and rural solid waste on the French soil. Each user will be able to consult on the application or the website, its publications, the newsfeed and the events happening near the place of residence.

Congratulations to Axel for Landfill Hunt, a project that he can materialize and develop if he wishes with the support of the YEC by continuing his training in the Master of Science ICE. To learn more about this project, while the application is being develop, a website has been set up.