Our 2020 finalists for the Bright SCIdea Challenge have been selected!
On 5 November, our shortlisted teams will pitch their idea to a panel of experts at the final to win a significant cash prize. The winners of the Bright SCIdea Challenge will walk away with £5,000 cash!
Meet the six teams who will be vying for the top prize:
CatchMaps:
Team CatchMaps is made up of three students from Cranfield University and Reading University.
What interested you to compete in Bright SCIdea Challenge?
This competition offers the opportunity to develop our business skills. We would like to think our scientific research abilities are strong but we are working hard to learn more about the business sector. The videos available to us were useful in developing our thinking and prompted us to think more rigorously about our costs. Additionally, we heard from previous attendees that we could greatly benefit from the networking opportunities at the event.
What are you hoping to achieve with your product/service?
The CatchMaps team are visionaries and ultimately we want our service be an essential tool that helps all farmers work in truly sustainable ways. This means helping them to balance their farm business profitability with connected, healthy landscapes that deliver goods like cleaner air and water to all of society. However, to achieve this vision, we must be pragmatic. So the service will be focused on providing farmers with information that they care about, can understand and can act upon. This means creating maps working in unison with our customers, helping them to see their farms from new perspectives.
QMUL:
Team QMUL is made up of three students from QMUL.
What are you hoping to achieve for your product or service by entering the Bright SCIdea Challenge?
We are hoping to spread awareness of our alternative green energy solution throughout the world and we believe to start with Bright SCIdea as it would help us connect with the scientific communities of the world. We hope to achieve a successful implementation of our idea, transforming the current state of energy market, helping countries achieve their UN goals and create a positive impact in other people’s daily lives. If we were to win, we would implement our product and therefore in the next 10 years, electricity would be significantly cheaper and carbon emissions would be reduced throughout the globe, finally supporting our planet to heal itself.
What interests you the most about Bright SCIdea?
The BrightSCIdea Challenge will help us connect with the scientific community, to compete with other bright minds and will give us vital feedback, helping us with improving our product and its future.
Metallogen:
Team Metallogen is made up of three students from UCL.
What interested you to compete in Bright SCIdea Challenge?
The unique mix of training, networking opportunities and business skills development offered by the program was immensely attractive to us, particularly given we are all aspiring scientists wishing to use our skills to action positive and sustainable change. The invaluable experience of developing a realistic business plan, from investigating cutting edge research to pitching our idea, will stand us all in good stead moving forwards with our careers.
What are you hoping to achieve with your product/service?
Our idea will combat heavy metal pollution in contaminated soils, helping alleviate the strain on agriculture and the wider ecosystem.
Cycloop:
Team Cycloop is made up of 5 students from the University of Edinburgh.
What are you hoping to achieve for your product or service by entering the Bright SCIdea Challenge?
We applied for the Bright SCIdea Challenge as we wanted to be challenged in something we haven't done before: writing a business plan, which included thinking deeply about finances, go-to-market strategies and so on. Preparing this application has brought us one small step closer to one day commercialise the product we are developing. Lastly, we could benefit very much from the prize money to further develop our prototype.
What interests you the most about Bright SCIdea?
Cycloop is a student-led startup with founders highly interest in science. SCIdea Challenge accelerates SCI’s vision of combine cutting-edge science with business opportunities, with which Cycloop can identify.
BioUnite:
Team BioUnite is made up of three researchers from The University of Sheffield
Describe your product or service in one line:
We will provide an easily accessible antimicrobial and anticancer drug screening facility, offering services from simple activity assays through to an in vivo invertebrate model, with discounted rates for University research groups to help them identify therapeutic leads.
Why did you enter the Bright SCIdea Challenge?
We have been designing a business idea throughout our PhD’s after noticing a gap in the market for a University linked biological testing facility. We decided to enter the Bright SCIdea challenge, as we feel that the advice and guidance we will receive from pitching the idea to industry experts, will prove invaluable in the development of our business model into a functioning service for our target market. We were attracted to the training which aided us in building a business plan and also the opportunity to gain experience delivering a business pitch to experts in the field.
AATBox:
Team AATBox is made up of four students from UCL
What interested you to compete in Bright SCIdea Challenge?
Bright SCIdea Challenge appealed to us because it seemed an excellent way to develop skills unobtainable at University. Although it promotes heavily academic thinking and creativity, we were most excited to receive professional entrepreneurial training. Also, the best way to influence everyday reality is trying to change it yourself. We wanted to immerse ourselves in a challenge like this.
What are you hoping to achieve with your product/service?
There are three main goals we want to accomplish by participating in the competition. Firstly, we want to revolutionise packaging technology by making it handier and by eliminating the need for single-use plastic and segregation bins. Secondly, we aimed to raise customers' awareness of modern chemistry applications. Eventually, we hope that our product will impact cultural change. AATBox team would love to inspire people to care more about the environment and prompt them to invent entirely new recipes influenced by our packing technology.
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