Europe’s most ground-breaking entrepreneurs and innovators were honoured last night at the EIT Awards ceremony at one of Europe’s most important innovation forums, INNOVEIT, in Budapest.
Tibor Navracsics, Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, said: “The winners of this year's EIT Awards are absolutely inspiring. The EIT Community and the EIT Awards show how many young Europeans have the talent, creativity and determination to help us tackle the big challenges facing our continent. The EIT is vital in offering young people the chance to transform their best ideas into products, services and jobs. To promote more innovators like these, Europe has to better integrate entrepreneurship and innovation into education – that’s exactly what the EIT Community does.”
2017 EIT Awards winners
- EIT CHANGE Award – rewards graduates who spur innovation and bring about societal change
Florence Gschwend (Switzerland), co-founder and Director of Operations of Chrysalix Technologies, for the BioFlex process that enables contaminated waste wood from construction and demolition to be transformed into inexpensive fuels, materials and chemicals, contributing to a cleaner tomorrow for us all.
Awarded €15,000 - EIT Innovators Award – recognises innovation teams developing a product or service with a high potential for societal and economic impact
Martin Steinberg (Sweden), Project Leader at the Karolinska Institute, for the Stockholm3 Test (STHLM3), an innovative cancer-detecting blood test. The test detects the risk of aggressive prostate cancer by combining five protein markers, more than 100 genetic markers, clinical data and a proprietary algorithm. Developed with the support of EIT Health, this non-invasive blood test reduces the number of unnecessary biopsies by 50% compared to current clinical practice.
Awarded €50,000 - EIT Venture Award – recognises Europe’s most promising ventures
Hans Constandt (Belgium), founder and CEO of Ontoforce, for DISQOVER, an innovative search tool that finds medical data faster, smarter and simpler to heal patients more effectively. DISQOVER aggregates data from an unlimited number of public, third-party and private sources. Supported by EIT Health, this advanced search technology will have a global impact on bringing drugs to market faster.
Awarded €50,000 - EIT Audience Award – a new Award chosen by all participants of INNOVEIT
Carsten Mahrenholz is co-founder and CEO of COLDPLASMATECH GmbH, the company behind the innovative “Plasma Patch” – a Star Trek-like device that uses cold plasma to kill multi-resistant bacteria and treat chronic wounds. Carsten’s goal is to pioneer the next step in modern medicine, by “fighting a problem that could take us back to the Middle Ages: antibiotic resistance”.
The winners were chosen by an international jury from among 20 nominations. Each finalist was selected for driving European innovation through ground-breaking products, services and processes that address global challenges in the fields of climate, energy, digitisation, health and raw materials. This year’s list of nominees stood out for its high percentage of women entrepreneurs (8 finalists, an increase of 22% over last year) and the high number of nominees related to climate change products or services (35%) and digital technologies (22%).
The full list and profiles of the 2017 EIT Awards winners can be found here: https://eit.europa.eu/innoveit#awards
For more information visit https://eit.europa.eu/innoveit#home
Media contact:
Magdalena Gryszko: press(at)eit.europa.eu, +36 307 889 875
Juliane Walter: eit(at)icwe.net
