Huawei, in partnership with EYIF, launches 3rd edition of InnoApps Hackathon
[Brussels, Belgium, 15 June 2016] Huawei and the European Young Innovators Forum (EYIF) have renewed their partnership to launch the InnoApps competition on 22 June 2016.
The InnoApps challenge, open to young European students and professionals under 36 years of age, is a joint initiative of the European Young Innovators Forum and Huawei that aims to contribute to the development of a more socially inclusive society in Europe by fostering e-skills, increasing e-participation and promoting entrepreneurship for young generations in Europe today.
“Smart cities are the future”
The new edition will focus on the Internet of Things as a cross-cutting technology domain and smart cities as a vertical application area, specifically addressing challenges regarding safe cities.
Unlike other competitions, InnoApps provides long-term mentoring and commercialisation support for the winning app to create a feasible and concrete pathway for the winning developers to market the result of their creativity and effort. The challenge runs in several phases: the ‘ideas’ phase ends in October, followed by a phase of online mentoring for selected candidates and, finally, by an apps development phase for selected ideas – the ‘hackathon’ – that culminates in a live-pitching final in February 2017 in Brussels.
“We launched the annual InnoApps challenge back in 2013 with EYIF to support young people in transforming their creative ideas into viable business projects. As an ICT leader with a long-term vision, we believe that nurturing young talent and fostering e-skills is one of the most important investments we can make,” said Tony Graziano, Vice-President of Huawei’s EU Public Affairs Office. “As connectivity increases, Huawei is developing multiple technologies for the Smart City concept, so we are ideally placed to advise and mentor these imaginative young people as to how they can feed their great ideas into real-world scenarios.”
“Together with Huawei, we are looking forward to embarking on this new edition, as part of Grow Global Year activities. InnoApps has become a recognised brand of an innovative app competition focusing on technology innovation and youth entrepreneurship with a strong mentoring element,” said Kumardev Chatterjee, EYIF Founder and President.
The launch event will take place at the European Parliament, on 22nd June in the presence of Huawei representatives, as well as policy-makers, InnoApps 2015 Finalist Levente Slajchó and a joint audience of young students and entrepreneurs. You can register for this event here.
The hackathon and the final event will take place at the end of January and in the first week of February 2017. A short roundup about InnoApps 2015 Winners can be found here.
About Huawei
Huawei is a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider. Our aim is to build a better connected world, acting as a responsible corporate citizen, innovative enabler for the information society, and collaborative contributor to the industry. Huawei’s 170 000 employees worldwide are committed to creating maximum value for telecom operators, enterprises and consumers. Our innovative ICT solutions, products and services are used in more than 170 countries and regions, serving over one-third of the world’s population.
Huawei currently has over 10 000 staff based in Europe, of whom 1 570 are working in R&D. We run 18 R&D organisations located in eight European countries (Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and the UK) and operate numerous joint innovation centres in partnership with telecom and ICT partners.
Further information is available at www.huawei.eu
