Applications are now open for startups to compete in the Nokia Open Innovation Challenge 2019.
Organised by Nokia, NOIC 2019 is a worldwide innovation competition offering up to $175,000 to innovators. The competition provides successful participants with a huge once in a lifetime opportunity to develop and improve their innovations with experts from Nokia and the Nokia Bell Labs.
Last year, the competition specifically targeted startups developing Internet of Things (IoT) solutions and networking solutions. This year however, the focus of NOIC 2019 is on Industrial Automation. The 2019 Nokia Open Innovation Challenge is on the lookout for startups developing disruptive automation technology for virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and others.
Nokia emphasises that the innovation doesn’t necessarily have to be new, “but your idea will reach new heights of interest within the industry domain with the right support from Nokia”.
“We believe that in the coming fourth industrial revolution, a convergence of operations technology (OT) and information and communication technology (ICT) will catalyze the wide scale automation in all industries and infrastructure.”
Marcus Weldon, president, Nokia Bell Labs.
Under the industrial automation focus, there are several themes or categories for startups to compete in. These include:
Multi Robot Collaboration: Orchestration systems and platforms to manage multi-robotic collaboration to accomplish given set of tasks and use cases applicable in industries and/or enterprise context.
Human Augmentation (including Augmented/Mixed/Virtual Reality): Software, hardware or embedded solutions to augment human capability for industrial and enterprise use cases.
Digital personal assistants: Intelligent, Personalised and Contextual software (and hardware) solutions which can truly understand human behaviour and co-exist alongside humans and assist their daily life tasks and industrial automation use cases.
Human Machine / Machine-Human: Software and/or hardware based solutions for human to machine and machine to human communication in industrial and enterprise automation context.
Edge computing: Breakthrough in edge computing including infrastructure, network and/or applications optimised for edge computing for Industrial and Enterprise use cases.
AI Application and Technologies: Disruptive AI applications, solutions and enabling technologies driving large scale efficiency, productivity and predictability to industrial and enterprise use cases.
Judging Criteria and Competition Prizes
Participating startups of the Nokia Open Innovation Challenge would be judged based on the innovativeness, feasibility, and scalability of their ideas according to the category requirements.
And like last year, the three startups with the best solutions would receive cash prizes of $100k (1st place), $50k (2nd place) and $25k (3rd place).
Other Benefits of NOIC 2019
Participating startups get business and technology support for their innovation. They could also get investment prospects from Nokia as well as access to Nokia network and global market. Lastly, the startups would get a chance to co-innovate and form business partnership with Nokia.
Applications for the competition is currently open, but will close on June 30, 2019. Click here to apply.
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