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This year’s winners were announced at an awards ceremony in Ottar, Sweden, where 14 finalists from five continents pitched their digital innovations in the fields of measurement and imaging to a panel of judges.
Key highlights
- Measure Sustainability category winner: Global Sustainable Enterprise System (GSES)
- Re-imagine Imaging category winner: Unleash Live
- Awards include a $30,000 collaboration and startup mentoring support from ABB and Microsoft
- Winners will be launched to customers in over 100 countries through ABB’s Ability Marketplace
Global Sustainable Enterprise System (GSES) won the Measure Sustainability category, with the Re-imagine Imaging category being won by Unleash Live. Both winners will be awarded a collaboration with ABB Measurement valued at $30,000US (~£25,000GBP), with the goal of fast-tracking their solution and bringing them to customers through the ABB Ability Marketplace in over 100 countries within the year. The winners will also receive guidance from both Microsoft’s startup advisors as well as ABB’s startups accelerator, SynerLeap.
“We had high hopes for this year’s Challenge having selected some high calibre candidates, and we weren’t disappointed,” said Jean-René Roy, Global Business Line Manager, ABB Measurement and Analytics. “We were impressed by the innovative ideas the Challenge yielded. The winning solutions offer interesting potential in improving the sustainability, productivity and performance of our customers’ operations. We look forward to working hand-in-hand with GSES and Unleashed live to bring these game changing ideas to market.”
Giovanna Dughera, Community Manager of Microsoft for Startups Switzerland, explains: “Every year, we are excited to see how the competing startups respond to the Challenges set by ABB. Innovation is at the heart of solving customer issues, and the fact that the ideas shared by GSES and Unleash live are highly innovative yet grounded in the real world makes them a perfect fit for the ABB portfolio of digital solutions.”
Leading up to the finale was a 10-day intensive development process in December, where the finalists worked with expert mentors from ABB, Microsoft Switzerland and SynerLeap to refine their innovations.
Measure Sustainability Award
The aim of this challenge was to drive the next level of insights from emission monitoring systems, providing ABB’s customers with more holistic, value-added information on their sustainability footprint.
Global Sustainable Energy Systems (GSES), the winner in this category, was founded in The Netherlands in 2019. ABB is looking forward to working with the 14-strong GSES team over the next few months to further refine and develop its innovative approach to measuring, verifying and rating the sustainability performance of products and organisations.
Re-imagine Imaging Award
The second challenge was about using digital imaging to complement ABB’s analyzer portfolio, providing customers with deeper insights, and improving safety, productivity and sustainability.
The winner in this category is Unleash live, which was founded in Australia in 2016 and now has 28 employees. ABB is excited by the potential for Unleash live’s video analytics innovation to drive down costs, improve productivity, accuracy and safety for its clients.