Sciensano wins the first Cisco Belux Innovation Challenge
We have a winner! Sciensano has won first-ever Cisco Belux Innovation Challenge (CBIC). With a diverse team of both IT and scientist profiles, they were able to convince the final jury and will now evolve their pretendotype into a minimum viable product with the support of Cisco. Many congratulations to Exki, who has won the Public Prize, but also to the other six contenders who were all able to present a strong pitch at the end of our 3-day Innovation Challenge.
The Sciensano team
What a fantastic journey we have had. Next to Sciensano and Exki, we have had teams from CHU Charleroi, ConXion, Delhaize, RTBF, Smals and Impact Valley. All seven teams created a solution to address the business challenges they selected. Right after the Innovation Challenge, most of the teams have been able to pitch their proposal to their board of directors or executive committees, allowing them to further develop their project. It was a true co-creation process!
The jury acknowledged that the public health organisation Sciensano presented the strongest project. The jury measured every project against five criteria: impact on the business, business & technical feasibility, creativity, team (stakeholder buy-in and capability to execute), and the level of persuasion of their pitch. The disruptive impact and the technical & business feasibility accounted for 60% of the results.
Sciensano will work on a secure and collaborative solution that digitises manual work and can save up to 1,5 hour per week per researcher. The solution uses connected cameras and voice commands to record and tag the steps of analysis protocols. It will create searchable research data that will automatically be registered in their management system and securely transported towards a central repository allowing collaboration between scientists within and outside the institution.
It is a very innovative solution they will be able to integrate with their existing Cisco infrastructure. Ghislain Bourgin and Guillaume de Saint-Marc, respectively Co-Innovation Center Lead of Cisco’s Paris Innovation and Research Lab (PIRL) and Head of innovation for Cisco in France, will team up with Sciensano to further develop their prototype.
I would like to thank the management teams of our customers and especially each team sponsor for allowing their business and technical staff to work on a project that will improve either their internal or commercial operations, like we have seen it with our two retail participants Delhaize and Exki. I am very eager to see how the seeds we have planted during this CBIC will grow, how Exki will create a new digital customer experience and how the collaboration solution we prototyped together with the CHU Charleroi for their homecare services will come to life.
The CBIC has been a key example of a co-creative hackathon to tackle real business challenges. Together with our 11 coaches I am already looking forward to next year’s edition.
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