Six Croatian projects will compete for the grand European award in Brussels
In 2016, the European Commission and the Spanish company Finnova founded the StartUp Europe Awards to recognise outstanding innovations originating from a total of 20 countries. Earlier tonight, Rijeka hosted the award ceremony for Croatia, organised by Business School PAR and the Department of Entrepreneurship of the City of Rijeka.
"StartUp Europe Awards presents a prize methodology for startups at local, regional, national and European level that fosters the open innovation and the collaboration between the different actors of the European ecosystem, through the private-public partnership to support entrepreneurs. Besides, it creates a network of contacts that will inspire and provided visibility to all the local startups so that, by using this network, they can scale their services and products at a global level", cites the Business School PAR website.
This year's edition of the StartUp Europe Awards Croatia saw applications of innovative projects in six categories: Green, IOT, Tourism, eHealth, EdTech and Social. Six winners in their respective categories will compete for the grand European award in Brussels later this year, reports Glas Istre on January 19, 2017.
The youngest inventor to win the award is Ante Toni Debelić, a high school student from Rijeka. His project GrowCity is an automatised portable system of food cultivation in ship containers designed to have their own micro-climate (read more here). A team of college students from Pula won the award for their project µSCOPE: a 3D-printed microscope that features software which turns optical data into digital and enables the user to store the information for later use. The microscope was modeled after the letter S of the glagolitic alphabet, and was devised to be used by elementary school children to encourage their interest in science.
Four other winners are private startup initiatives: Redi Isokinetic (team leader Aco Momčilović from Zagreb), Mathrix (Agata Starčević from Rijeka), Balcan Roads (Filip Jakovac and Ana Somek from Rijeka), and ePlanetsport (Tomislav Smokvina from Rijeka).
Around twenty Croatian projects were applied to this year's competition, and the six winners will face other European inventors in Brussels at a later date. Good luck!
