Last week, I joined the OpenInnovation Circularity challenge and I’m proud to share that my team has won the 3rd prize for the best solution and won the Audience Favorite award!
OpenInnovation Circularity is an innovation challenge organized by DTU Skylab, Copenhagen School of Entrepreneurship, and Actory. It focuses on solving sustainability problems in various industries, such as reducing waste and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as promoting a circular economy and designing for sustainability.
The case we were trying to tackle was presented by Convatec, one of the biggest manufacturers of medical infusion devices. The company would like to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045 and reduce material waste.
It was an exciting, fun, and insightful journey. I have never participated in such a hackathon before, but I follow news about startups and technologies that strive to help our planet, so I was curious about what creative inventions could be born during this competition, what the process looks like, who are the people that create innovation, and of course, I wanted to contribute myself:)
My team was comprised of very talented and enthusiastic people with diverse backgrounds and competencies, but we had little to no experience in the medical industry, knowledge about designing such products, material engineering, or sustainability. This factor made me very skeptical about whether we could find a solution to the challenge. It wasn’t easy either due to the very strict regulations on medical devices and having to maintain their safety, efficiency, and user-friendliness.
However, over the three days of the challenge, my opinion changed. I felt very inspired by various talks on circularity and sustainability, as well as seeing the optimism, energy, and enthusiasm of other participants and competition facilitators. Finally, through intense research, brainstorming, calculating, and prototyping, we came up with a redesign of the product that would significantly reduce the emissions during the production process and allow for its reusability by the users. While our solution might have flaws, participating in this challenge showed me that, through some effort, even laymen can dive into an issue and come up with some brilliant, out-of-the-box ideas, making an everlasting impact.
I want to thank everyone on my team, InfuSave: Benjamin Meilhac, Mathilde Cros, Olivia Lee, and Giulia Gotti. Our achievement was only possible because we combined our skills, creativity, and motivation. It was a pleasure to work with you all.
I also want to thank all the organizers, facilitators, speakers, and company partners for making the event happen. It was an amazing experience and I’m looking forward to joining the competition again in the future!
Here are some photos from the event by 4V Films and Agata Skrzypczyk (click to open full photo):
Some renders I created of the redesigned infuser:
If you want to have a look at the model:
Download Blender file
And if you want to learn more about the problem and our solution here is also
our slide deck that we used during final presentation:
Download slides