EIT Manufacturing: BoostUp Regional Final CLC East Winners

The BoostUp! competition regional final of CLC East, by EIT Manufacturing, took place on 29 and 30 October and 12 ventures are now heading to the grand final.

This two-day hybrid event was hosted in the Novotel at the main train station in Vienna and broadcasted via livestream. More than 50 visitors on-site and several hundred online participants followed the highly interesting programme.

Out of 41 applications received by CLC East, 26 candidates were selected to pitch their ideas online in the Regional Finals in the categories ‘Create’, ‘Accelerate’ and ‘Transform’. The jury consisting of representatives from EIT Manufacturing and industry experts from all over Europe awarded 12 teams as winners and nominated them for the Grand Final of the 2020 BoostUp! Competition.

Learn more about the winners here

To round up the event, CLC East brought three top-class keynote speakers on stage. Dr. Paul Rübig, a member of the Governing Board of EIT, highlighted in his speech the importance of the manufacturing industry in Europe and encouraged continuous innovation. Mark Gallagher, top executive in Formula 1 for more than 35 years, gave insights on how Formula 1 consistently reinvented itself in the years, the challenges they had to tackle and how Formula 1 managed their business transformations. Last, but not least, Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, the first woman to climb all 14 eight thousand meter summits without the use of bottled oxygen, took the participants on an extraordinary journey through her last 20 years of expedition life and taught everyone to believe in themselves and never give up on dreams. There was not a dry eye left.

Among the guests, CLC East had the honour to welcome delegates from the Embassy of Romania and the Embassy of the Republic of Bulgaria in Vienna, representatives from the Hub in Romania as well as representatives of EIT, EIT Manufacturing, the city of Vienna, the Vienna Business Agency, Platform Industry 4.0, and many more important organisations. To close the event, special awards were given to the best performer among the online pitches, the winner of the EIT Manufacturing Quiz and the best moderator.

Tremendous Innovation Potential All Over Eastern Europe

Create Category

Early-stage projects for a greener and more resilient future of European manufacturing were competing.

• First place: 3D Food Printing of Plant-Based Seafood Alternatives (Austria), producing complex, heterogeneous products such as salmon fillets or tuna steaks, which do not exist on the market right now
• Second place: Wasteful (Bulgaria), with its solution to produce recycled pavements from plastic and construction waste
• Third place: Multi-Purpose Disinfection Robot (Hungary), enabling automated disinfection procedures for companies engaged in factory work
• Fourth place: End-To-End Intelligence Augmentation (IA) Platform (Romania), addressing the skills and innovation gap in the manufacturing industry by providing actionable manufacturing insights to businesses

Accelerate Category

The candidates in this category are start-ups and scale-ups ready to expand their businesses.

• First place: D-Cube Immersive Solutions (Greece), specialised in cutting-edge quality assurance solutions for diverse industrial domains
• Second place: Radicos Technologies GmbH (Austria), develops and supplies TWIN, a patented hardware sensor platform for IoT applications
• Third place: twinzo j.s.a. (Slovakia), their 3D Live Digital Twin can visualise any type of data and becomes the management’s central point for decision making
• Fourth place: Incus GmbH (Austria), a high-tech system provider for additive manufacturing of metal powder

Transform Category

SMEs, tackling the transformation challenges into new business models or technologies, participated.

• First place: Katty Fashion Ltd (Romania), a highly innovative SME, is transitioning from a rather unsustainable garment manufacturing business model to a more sustainable one
• Second place: Hollen s.r.o. (Slovakia), helps automotive manufacturers and their suppliers to improve the quality of their production
• Third place: Roseal S.A. (Romania), an innovative SME focusing on providing research, design, production, repair, technical assistance, and commercialisation of almost all kinds of existing sealing systems and materials
• Fourth place: CSF Electric Ltd. (Hungary) produces textile industrial devices, such as washing, drying, cooling and dedusting machines

All the candidates showed that the European manufacturing industry is on the edge of change and that global innovation in this sector can be clearly led by Europe.

Visit the dedicated website for pictures, videos and much more