Winners of HSE{Business}Cup 2018 Announced
At the end of November, HSE’s Moscow campus hosted the finals of HSE{Business}Cup 2018 – a completion for student business projects. In total, six teams received grants equal to 200,000 roubles from HSE to make their ideas a reality.
A total of 15 projects (6 projects from Moscow and 9 from other HSE’s campuses in Nizhny Novgorod, St. Petersburg and Perm) reached the final round and were presented to the expert committee.
In total, 243 applications were submitted to take part in competition. HSE Business Incubator experts selected 40 teams (116 participants) to take part in educational intensive internships. For a month, the students worked on their ideas with expert support. For instance, they studied potential consumers and their needs, studied competitors, worked on business models and enhanced their presentations. The projects that showed remarkable progress over the course of the programme made it to the finals.
‘This year, we had a record number of applications. It’s clear that our students are interested in business. Of course, most of the projects were just elaborated ideas, but this is typical for student projects. So, we added an educational module to the competition’s programme,’ says Chingiz Sabiev, the Curator of the HSE{Business}Cup 2018.
In addition to the main cash prizes, three teams — Dozhdeweek (St. Petersburg), INDITOYS (Moscow), and PeriodBox (Moscow) received additional gifts — Fibrum virtual reality helmets from the founder of Fibrum, HSE graduate Ilya Flaks.
The members of the competition committee include: venture investor Alexander Rumyantsev; Head of HSE’s Business Incubator Acceleration Programmes, Svetlana Aleksandrova; founder and CEO of Fibrum Ilya Flaks; Deputy Head of the HSE Innovation and Enterprise Office, Mikhail Demidov; Head of the Nizhny Novgorod Center for Entrepreneurship, Ekaterina Prokhorova; Director of the Centre of Innovative Entrepreneurship at HSE St. Petersburg, Sergey Melchenko; Dean of the Faculty of Economics, Management, and Business Informatics at HSE Perm, Dmitry Gergert.
Winners of HSE{Business}Cup 2018:
INDITOYS (Moscow) — a service for selecting educational toys for individual customers based onmachine learning technology;
Dozhdeweek (St. Petersburg) — advertising on free raincoats for tourists;
Period Box (Moscow) — a subscription set for menstrual days, which includes hygiene items, organic cosmetics, healthy snacks, etc.;
Qlines (Moscow) — a software complex to determine damage points on high voltage power lines by measuring instantaneous values of current and voltage;
Aeroponic Panel (Nizhny Novgorod) — wall-mounted automated panel on aeroponics, which allows you to grow greens all year-round and decorate your home.
Legally-Reasonable Assistant (St. Petersburg) — a legal reference for non-professionals who need to rely on neural networks.