No more lines in front of museums or check-in counters; if it’s up to HurryQ, queues will soon be a thing of the past. Last night the young startup won the Baby Pitch award, hosted at Rockstart by ACE Students and Philips. Here, ten contestants had one minute to perfectly pitch their ideas to a jury to take home the grand prize of 500 euro’s and a spot at the national Philips Innovation Award where a whopping 50.000 euro’s is at stake.
Pitch, pitch, pitch
The Baby Pitch-event is the third pitching-event from ACE this year. In late September Ace Venturelab hosted the successful Get in The Ring, earlier this month the Humanities Venture Lab held its first ever Startup Challenge.
Philips Innovation Award
The Baby Pitch is part of a bigger series of seminars that Philips organizes in all the major Dutch student cities. During these seminars, Philips aims to inform students about their prestigious Innovation Award, which is the largest student-entrepreneur prize in The Netherlands. With detailed information about the prize and enrollment, guest speeches from successful entrepreneurs and a lot of interesting pitches, it’s a night that shows how valuable a good idea can be for yourself and the for the future – and for Philips, of course. This year’s winner of the Philips Innovation Award was AVA – an app that enables deaf people to see what people say in under a second.
Platform
The thing that Philips wants to emphasize most, is that their Innovation Award isn’t a prize, but a platform. It’s not a winner takes all-principle, but a program where each participant learns and gains profit from. Sure, the winner receives a prize worth 50.000 euro’s (10.000 euro’s cash, the rest of the value comes from office space, training and mentorship programs), but every participant receives guidance and coaching by experts to learn how they can develop their ideas and business plans in a sustainable, effective manner.
Baby Pitch
The Baby Pitch proved that students not only have good ideas, but also an uncanny amount of sincere enthusiasm and energy. Ten students pitched their ideas to the jury, ranging from a project to sell affordable bikes to women in Bangladesh to an app that connects people via food. Unfortunately it didn’t matter whether the sector was education, health, lifestyle or environment, as the first question the jury posted after each pitch was: how is this going to make money?
HurryQ
The best answer to that question came from HurryQ, an app idea that aims to get rid of long, tiresome queues in front of museums and other check-in counters. With the app, HurryQ wants to digitalize the queue, meaning that you get a notification from the app once it’s your turn at the desk. According to CEO Bhupinder Singh (who thought of the idea when he took his parents to the Anne Frank museum and had to stand in the rain for over an hour), the idea gives an enormous boost to the total customer experience.
HurryQ received 500 euro’s and a spot at the Philips Innovation Award edition in 2017. Here, the startup will continue to further develop their idea and business model, with the hope of taking home the big check.
