January 11th 2017

MCI awards innovative business ideas

MCI Creativity Award – The Entrepreneurial School® awards students’ most innovative business concepts. Strong entrepreneurial potential for new products, processes and markets.

The legendary MCI Creativity Award resulted in outstanding business ideas as well as hard-earned Christmas gifts at the end of 2016. In collaboration with the CAST Center for Academic Spin-offs Tyrol, MCI Management Center Innsbruck awarded its students for the most creative business ideas.

With an impressive total of 43 submitted projects, students at the Entrepreneurial School® proved their high degree of creativity, their entrepreneurial potential and their “startup spirit”. The annual MCI Creativity Award goes to exceptional business and product ideas. It is open to all MCI students that display entrepreneurial spirit and want to take on economic and societal responsibility. The submitted projects reflect the wide range of study and research programs offered at MCI, covering economic and social sciences as well as technical and life sciences. The five winners were carefully chosen by a jury in a challenging, multi-step selection process.

With the financial support of CAST, the Federation of Austrian Industries and the Die Presse newspaper, the most innovative business ideas were awarded with prizes worth over 4,000 EUR in total.

Here are the winners and their ideas:

1st place: Silvia Mair, Lukas Schmelcher, Annika Unger and Katharina Anna Wieser
(Industrial Engineering & Management)
SM Teleskop – This convenient telescope stick facilitates mowing grass on steep slopes.

2nd place: Egon Simon Veit and Claudio Jäger
(Management & Law and Mechatronics)
ATSS – Development and sales of an autonomous, mobile measuring platform for water bodies.

3rd place: Julian Kirchmair, BSc MSc
(Environmental, Process & Energy Engineering)
Drinking water treatment facility for emerging countries – A new procedure based on state-of-the-art technology for efficient and sustainable treatment of drinking water that removes pathogenic germs.

4th place: Christoph Nothegger, Philipp Halder, BA
(Management, Communication & IT)
“Oh, interesting!” – An innovative idea for personal development.

5th place: Niklas Braig, Marijan Divkovic
(Business & Management)
Heldenjob – An app for rapid hero procurement for anyone in need of a “Held” (German for hero).

Statements:

Marcus Hofer, CEO at CAST: „The MCI Creativity Award allows students to analyze and test the market for their ideas. It’s incredible how much potential motivated MCI students and their creative minds bear! I am happy that CAST can help MCI support young people on their way to starting their own business.”

Bernd Ebersberger, head of research, innovation & entrepreneurship at MCI: „With its MCI Creativity Award, MCI is opening doors for students to start their own business. Everybody is a winner in this: the local economy as well as the students, who receive individual coaching for their business concepts.”

Andreas Altman, rector at MCI Management Center Innsbruck: „As an Entrepreneurial School® we promote and challenge young people’s entrepreneurial spirit. With the MCI Creativity Award, MCI and its partners encourage entrepreneurial thinking and actively shape the startup environment in Tyrol.”



Press contact
Mag. (FH) Ulrike Fuchs
Marketing & Communication
+43 512 2070-1527
ulrike.fuchs@mci.edu