Noise cancellation for windows in a building, braille for smartphones and a robot-table to practice handwriting. These are just some of the most exciting innovations to make it to the semifinals of the Blue Tulip Awards 2020. The jury has made a further selection, leaving only the top 10 in eight themes.
Blue Tulip Awards announces top 10
Last month, the judges cut the more than 600 innovations that registered for each of the eight themes in the Blue Tulip Awards down to the best 25 in each category. After rounds of speed dating between the innovations and jury members and much deliberation, they cut it down even further. Leaving only a top 10 of fresh ideas that are ready to disrupt the world of finance, mobility, security, climate, living & working, health, nutrition and education to go to the next round.
Curious about who made it to the semifinals? These eighty innovations represent the ten best ideas in each category.
Climate
Barsha Pump is a hydro-powered water pump that can lift water from rivers or canals, using the energy present in the water flow.
DeltaQ maintains a high thermal comfort with the lowest energy consumption possible by using predictive models.
Envi.Base by Envitron controls the energy flow of heat pumps, solar panels, batteries and EV charging stations based on external data sources.
Goldilocks is a bio-based alternative to fossil resources. It can replace fossil crude oil as a platform product for materials, chemicals and fuels.
GreenRock is a modular building block for clean energy storage systems that uses saltwater battery-based technology.
HeatCycle recovers heat from all household wastewater, creating the source of an internal heat pump that can efficiently raise the temperature of incoming tap water.
PolyStyreneLoop offers a sustainable solution for the treatment of PS-foam demolition waste containing flame-retardant HBCD.
Robotic wind turbine maintenance is a robotic system that can tackle the expensive and unsafe act of inspecting and cleaning wind turbines blades.
TerraBattery is a rechargeable battery system that is environmentally friendly and fully recyclable.
Upp! UpCycling Plastic offers a local and circular solution for cities and regions. It closes the plastic waste circle locally and does so in a circular manner in the Upp! Circular Plastic Factory concept.
Education
Conversational Academy enables brands to create chatbots and voice assistants that are more helpful, natural, and persuasive.
CoVince Adventurous Learning platform is a distribution platform in open store for shielded use and a content creation platform with configurable VR, AR, AI and mobile-building blocks.
Diagnose is a novel and practical step towards more personal education that uses a working algorithm that, based on a few questions, estimates what you already know and don’t know.
Faqta Wereld & Talent is an online video-based learning platform for children in primary schools, with teachers as coaches and activators for learning.
Lifelong learning platform helps learners take control of their career by connecting their favorite sources of learning, with various integrated courses.
NOOMI is a self-coaching tool that learns and explains the different aspects of your behavior without boxing you in predefined categories or stereotypes.
Picoo provides a mobile platform that enables playful and physically engaging learning for children in primary school.
Sqriba is a robotic table that enables users to train their handwriting skills by repetitive movement of the perfect letters.
TheNewWayofWork is an online platform that can solve innovative business challenges with young talents and companies.
Winc Academy has developed a process to prepare people for their first job as a software developer, without the need for specific knowledge or prior education.
Finance
Bizcuit (‘biz kit’), the Swiss army knife for SME businesses is a business kit app linked to the bank accounts, accounting software, payroll software, ERP software and various other relevant parties for SMEs.
Chiron automates the model validation process from model inventory to data management and generation of regulatory compliant documentation.
Digital Insurance Platform enables insurers to build new propositions from scratch or in addition to their existing systems with a unique short time-to-market.
Evergreen Hash (EgHash™) creates a digital identity by utilizing biometric modalities, generating a unique hashed-tokenized identity that can identify the subject using their probabilistic AI.
Filerskeepers offers multinationals insight into how long they should be storing their data based on legal requirements.
Integrity Check creates a digital ring-fence around the financial system, preventing bad actors from getting in and allowing financial institutions to warn each other of these bad actors.
Online Payment Platform prevents online seller fraud on platforms and marketplaces by withholding the funds of the buyer until the goods or services have been delivered.
Secure digital escrow facility for consumers, businesses and professionals verifies all parties digitally, including bank verification matching the ID thereby minimizing the risk of fraud.
BridgeFund analyses the bank transactions of a company and assesses their creditworthiness quickly and accurately.
Twinco (Finance Program) combines technology and privileged access to data to assess performance risk, allowing their users to fund both small and large suppliers across the world.
Health
ArtiQ.PFT uses artificial intelligence to calculate disease probabilities and raises the percentage of accuracy of the diagnosis after pulmonary function tests.
Pharmaoffer – B2B platform for pharmaceutical raw materials gives all pharmacists worldwide easy access to affordable high-quality raw materials.
D60 disinfects endoscopes within 1 minute without using chemicals or liquids, which leads to less inventory, less damages due to transport, increased patient turnover, no water waste or use of harmful chemicals.
EMDR-VR offers autonomous VR therapy to allow clients with mental health problems to treat themselves independently in-between traditional sessions.
Hable braille interface device develops a braille interface device for smartphones. This device gives a blind person the ability to control their whole smartphone, quicker than voice operated devices.
Ivy One frees patients from infusion poles by building a wearable infusion pump. With the pomp, patients can walk around freely, enabling better and faster recovery.
Methica CC is a test kit for the epigenetic detection of early stage cervical cancer.
Momo BedSense prevents pressure ulcers through monitoring the patient’s posture and sending a signal to the nurse if the patient has been lying in the same position for long.
Nemo Fetal Monitoring System is an innovative, wearable device that accurately monitors fetal and maternal heart rate and uterine activity.
PlaygroundVR is a virtual reality playground for children in hospitals where up to eight children can meet, talk and play.
Living & working
Ekkono Edge is a software company that does machine learning for IoT.
Equalture helps recruiters predict their candidate’s job fit and cultural fit to build top-performing teams and grow their company.
Letos suggests a sensor solution that can evaluate true spontaneous physiological reactions to enhance technological developments and advancements.
Manual.to offers an easy and intuitive way of creating, sharing and reading video-text instructions, with instant translation and automated design to share knowledge between colleagues.
Niluk is a social network app that facilitates meaningful offline social interactions among young adults based on proximity and similar interests.
OTree Lilly is a product that combines technology and the air-purifying power of plants to filter the air inside classrooms, offices and homes.
PlaytoWork is a gaming platform that matches graduates to recruiters by revealing a set of soft skills showing the graduate’s true potential in the work field.
Sensfix is an IoT-enabled service-management platform on blockchain for operations and maintenance managers to easily digitalize their workflows.
Smart Windows For Smart Homes is an active noise cancellation technology that can be integrated inside window frames.
Unified Framework for Blockchain-based Business Integration develops enterprise applications, builds process modelling tools and creates a 360° ecosystem around tokenized assets.
Mobility
Avy Aera – Wing drones for good are autonomous and designed for long-range, beyond visual line of sight missions, made to access hard-to-reach places while maintaining safety.
Buurtvervoer is a short distance carpooling service that connects users to local electric vehicles owners willing to share a short ride.
Chargetrip – Smart navigation for EVs accelerates the global mass adoption of electric mobility while alleviating charge congestion and optimize travel-time and travel-costs.
Ducktrain elevates short haul logistics, eliminating the need for conventional transporters in cities and industry parks.
Flexible shore side electricity based on hydrogen storage container offer a flexible solution to marine pollution by vessels at berth in harbors by providing clean energy to ships.
Guaranteed Mobility is a mobility provider, specialized in shared, electric vehicles.
Increase capacity of existing rail infrastructure with IoT has developed a wireless sensor with which rail network operators can increase capacity on the track.
Maxem Direct Payment builds electric car charging solutions that accepts debit and credit card to avoid the hassle of charging passes.
Parcls.com, your second front door is a local one-stop-shop for all package pickups.
The Charge Tile (HUBi) is a charging tile for eBikes.
Nutrition
AdalbaPro converts insect larvae into sustainable, high quality, functional ingredients in a fully automated breeding and rearing facility.
AI food waste monitor runs an AI image recognition algorithm that recognizes ingredients from a picture and allows its users to optimize the inefficiencies in their food providing process.
Automating Insect Control with Bat-like Drones automates insect control for horticulture by monitoring and eliminating flying pest insects in the air with bat-like drones.
Carb free bread (brand name currently under NDA) is a disruptive innovation that will change the world-in-food while providing high nutrient.
CELINE technology measures the irrigation water nutrient composition online and changes the composition to what is needed according to data.
InstockMarket.nl collects wasted food products, that do not fit the standards in their Food Rescue Center, and uploads when on their online platform with next day delivery.
Integrated Seaweed Cultivation System enables seaweed cultivation and use for human food, animal feed, fertilizer and biomass for energy and bioplastics.
OTFLOW® has developed a floor cover to place in a fruit box that fixes the air flow and keeps all fruit cool during the long weeks of transit and therefore cuts food waste.
Verdify offers an unprecedented digital platform for evidence-based personalized nutrition that radically simplifies implementing prescribed diets in daily life.
Winnow Vision takes photos of wasted food as it is thrown away and uses the images to register food waste.
Security
Anticipating criminal behaviour by discovering the narrative in data translates disparate data into narrative scenarios that help organizations mitigate threats and enhance opportunities.
Beyond DLP enables organizations to proactively and automatically protect against internal and external threats.
BrainMatter accelerates data enrichment and enables data governance for all AI projects.
Deepfact helps governments, organizations and individuals to automatically spot Deepfake videos and images on social media, to avoid the propagation of fake news with malicious intentions.
Dot reduces the risk of cyber-attacks for critical national infrastructure providers, advanced manufacturers and owners of building automation and control systems.
Evergreen Hash (EgHash™) addresses the need to create an identity for everyone in order to achieve universal financial and societal inclusion.
Oddity real-time violence detection has developed a machine and deep learning algorithm that detects violence real-time on live video feeds.
Sovrin Network uses the power of a distributed ledger to give every person, organization and thing the ability to own and control their own permanent digital identity.
Supply chain security assurance platform is a secure social network that enables organizations to conduct security assurance across their entire supply chain in a highly efficient way.
TLF Cyber. Cyber Defense Center infrastructure prevents cyber-incidents for cyber-security service providers and their SMB clients.
What’s next?
Next step for these innovations is the semi-finals, which will take place on March 12 at DeFabrique in Utrecht, The Netherlands. There will be several rounds of talk shows and Q&A sessions that form the basis for the judges of each theme to pick their top 5 innovations. These will move on to the finals, which will take place during the Accenture Innovation Summit on April 17th 2020. There they will compete for a price-package that is designed to accelerate their business.
This article is produced in collaboration with Accenture. Read more about our partnering opportunities.
