The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) has announced a total of 41 nominees from 23 countries for this year’s EIT Awards. EIT’s Knowledge and Innovation Community (KIC) focusing on ICT, EIT Digital, is represented by a strong line-up of deep tech candidates.
EIT organises the annual EIT Awards to recognise the most successful graduates, entrepreneurs and innovators supported by the EIT Community. Rewarded are those driving European innovation through ground-breaking products, projects and services that tackle global challenges in EIT’s main focus areas of climate, energy, digitalisation, food, health and raw materials.
This year a total of 41 nominees from across EIT's six KICs have been selected to compete in four categories. Among them, seven role models for change will enter the race to represent EIT Digital.
All eyes on EIT Digital hopefuls
In the EIT CHANGE category, graduates from different EIT education programmes are honoured. Nominees Xin Hu and Mahmoud Khodier are both graduates of the <link eit-digital-academy master-school>EIT Digital Master School. Xin co-founded MatchX, which provides an end-to-end LPWAN IoT solution for sharing device data, and Mahmoud set up Slangsh, which is set to revolutionise the online opinion and review domain by making it possible to get highly accurate and easy-to-explore reviews in various areas.
The EIT INNOVATORS Award recognises top innovation activities in the EIT universe. One of EIT Digital’s hopefuls here is CEDUS, which stands for City Enabler for Digital Urban Services Innovation Activity, and is led by Lanfranco Marasso. CEDUS allows crawling, collecting and rendering of scattered and heterogeneous urban data – including open, sensor or legacy data – for a number of city service providers.
All eyes are also on another candidate for the INNOVATORS Award, György Dán, head of SOC4CI – the Security Operations Center for Critical Infrastructure Innovation Activity – which provides a customised detection and response service against Advanced Persistent Threats (APT).
For scaleups the EIT VENTURE Award is up for grabs. In this category CheckPoint Cardio is representing EIT Digital. The company combines advanced medical devices with software to follow patients’ vital statistics in real time.
Women awarded for the first time ever
For the very first time, the EIT WOMAN Award recognises the outstanding work and achievements of an exceptional woman from the EIT KICs. One EIT Digital nominee is Dóra Pálfi whose company imagiLabs has created an educational platform and tools to teach programming that is designed with a focus on girls’ needs. Dóra, together with <link eit-digital-academy>EIT Digital Academy alumna Maria Kanov, also co-founded Women@EIT, a network connecting both female EIT students and alumni members and providing a cross-KIC platform for interdisciplinary knowledge exchange. Maria is also running for the EIT WOMAN Award due to her Women@EIT involvement.
The EIT Awards 2018 ceremony will be held in Budapest on 4 October during EIT’s annual Innovation Forum, INNOVEIT. The day before the event, the candidates will need to pitch their way through to the final. Only a handful of the current 41 nominees will make it through to a final presentation round during INNOVEIT where the prizes ranging from EUR 20,000 to EUR 50,000 will be granted by a panel composed of renowned experts.
