PhD students for innovative startups in the environment, information technology and biomedical sciences. A look into the not too distant future for products that have been designed for mass production. It is the identikit of the winners of the 2021 edition of Startcup Lombardia, the competition organized by the Lombard universities and promoted by the Region with the coordination of PoliHub, the technological incubator of the Polytechnic. The four 25 thousand euro prizes went to startups that will use the resources to finish the development of the projects.
Candidates and ideas
Thirteen nominations submitted to the jury, united by an advanced approach to research, often the result of doctoral students at the Polytechnic and the Sant’Anna High School of Pisa: renewable energy, safety at work, information technology, industrial technologies and biomedical sciences. For the energy sector, the Milanese team of Sinergy Flow, creator of a low environmental impact battery that uses waste materials instead of cobalt, lithium and graphite. “We are perfecting batteries capable of using materials such as sulfur to store the energy produced by renewables avoiding the problem of disposal” – explains the materials engineer Alessandra Accogli. A result achieved with work that began in 2019 and continued even remotely during the pandemic.
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Startcup Lombardia, here are the innovative teams awarded
The smart factory and fitness
Instead, the work of the Komete startup with the “Smart Factory made easy” project focused on safety in production sites – where accidents continue to occur almost daily – a high-tech platform that implements the idea of a smart factory by creating ad hoc software to reduce the interaction between employees and processing plants. For the contest dedicated to industrial technologies the prize went to Gymnasio who developed an artificial intelligence system applied to fitness, with complex monitoring of body activity.
The biosciences
Research on cellular tissues was instead the winning card of TTop, a micro-physiological platform that allows you to do biological research at low cost. The special prize (also in this case of 25 thousand euros) was assigned to the ElastoBrain project born between Pisa and the Polytechnic, curated by Camilla Conti and Lorenzo Agostini who tell the genesis: “We set ourselves the problem of developing intelligent suits with sensors that receive alert messages from industrial machinery: our challenge was to miniaturize them on fabrics similar to those of a normal t-shirt but “innervated” by artificial intelligence: if the machine detects a danger for the operator, the latter is warned with vibrations to the limbs ” . There is also room for a new approach to financial technologies in blockchainwith Exain software that allows startups and small businesses to simplify access to digital credit. Now the repercussions on the labor market are expected, as the Councilor for Economic Development of the Lombardy Region Guido Guidesi reminds us: “We support innovative ideas and try to transform them into related activities and opportunities for qualified employment”.
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28 October 2021 | 09:05
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