“It was clear from the applications submitted that the issues of sustainability and environmental protection are of great importance to the students. As we received ideas from all four faculties at Rhein-Waal University of Applied Sciences, there were also many technical and digital innovations amongst them. Given the high standard and diversity of the entries, it was no easy task for us to select the top three,” reports Dr Gerhard Heusipp, jury member and head of ZFIT.
The following ideas were awarded prizes:
- Aerthlings app (Aleya Jobson, BA in Gender & Diversity; Budi Handoko, MSc in Bionics/Biomimetics; Gerardo Garzon Alvarez, MA in Digital Media; Minh Mai Anh Nguyen, BA in International Business and Social Sciences) Aerthlings is an app that promotes climate protection in a playful way through the use of stories, game mechanics and incentives. Use your smartphone to enter a fantastical dimension and bring about change in real life.
- Inspired by love (Daniela Venegas, MSc Usability Engineering) In the case of ‘Inspired by love’, an idea was transformed into a device designed to prevent people with diabetes from developing lipohypertrophy, a genetically determined increase in adipose tissue.
- StayAllEco (Anna-Lea Koßbu, Sustainable Tourism; Luana Dietz, Yannik Müller, Jule Pannen, Bio Science and Health) StayAllEco is the booking platform for a sustainable travel industry, which had already won at DemoDay Pitch Patch #2, the closing event of the StartGlocal Academy in the summer of 2021.
This year, too, the prize money was sponsored by the friends’ associations of Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences – Förderverein Hochschule Rhein-Waal e.V., Förderverein Campus Cleve e.V. and Förderverein Campus Camp-Lintfort e.V. The university would like to extend its warmest thanks to the support associations.
StartGlocal – Global Spirit for Local Start-ups
The “StartGlocal – Global Spirit for Local Start-ups” project has been funded since April 2020 as part of the EXIST programme by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and the European Social Fund. Sustainability is the project team’s top priority: for every milestone reached in a project, a tree is to be planted as part of a ‘StartGlocal Forest’. ‘The issue of sustainability is of great importance in our StartGlocal project. It is very important to us to establish the university as an innovation partner for sustainability issues in the region, whilst at the same time involving our students and thereby supporting their development,” said Dr Gerhard Heusipp, Head of the Centre for Research, Innovation and Transfer at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences.
StartGlocal Academy
As part of the StartGlocal Academy workshop programme within the StartGlocal project, students and alumni of the university interested in setting up a business were given the opportunity during the summer semester of 2021 to acquire the basic know-how required to launch a start-up.
In an interactive classroom setting, the students were supported by experts and mentors from the start-up and entrepreneurship sectors. Across twelve consecutive online workshops, participants were taught all the key skills and processes essential for a start-up, including idea generation, business models, prototyping and, on a practical level, the legal and tax aspects of running a business. ‘Demo Day’ is the closing event of the StartGlocal Academy, at which all participants present their product or start-up idea to an audience, who in turn select the winners via a live vote.
The StartGlocal Academy took place for the second time in the summer term of 2021, following the first round of this programme at the end of the 2020/21 winter semester, when twelve student teams presented their ideas and student Blanca Paschen impressed the judges with her ‘floating gardens’ concept.
The ‘StartGlocal’ project is funded by:
