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IoT/WT World Innovation Competition Pushes Creativity in Tech Applications

September 22, 2017 by Chantelle Dubois

The Innovation World Cup Series is a collection of competitions targeting developers and "technpreneurs" to foster the development of open innovation.

The Innovation World Cup is a competition series where designers can apply for (mostly) free hardware and develop IoT devices for prizes. Here's a look at the hardware kits that sponsors have offered up, as well as past winners.

The Innovation World Cup Series is targets developers and "technpreneurs" to foster the development of open innovation. 

This is accomplished by providing software development kits and prizes, supported by a variety of electronics and semiconductor companies. Prizes vary from cash, to startup coaching, and exposure to the industry. Special prizes are also available such as EBV IoT Hero, LoRaWAN Challenge, Connected Living Challenge, Security Award, Smart Clothing, and Smart Home.

Currently, the IoT/WT Innovation World Cup is accepting applications in seven different categories until November 18th: Home, City, Lifestyle, Industrial, Transportation, Healthcare, and Retail. 

The IoT-Focused Hardware

Participants are able to register for free, and the competition also lists software development kits which can be requested for free from companies like STMicroelectronics, LoRa Alliance, BSH and Geeny, and EBV Electronrik. Gemalto is also providing a development kit with at a discount. Each kit has a limited supply available. A full listing of the kits are available here, but a few highlight are mentioned below:

 

X-NUCLEO-IKS01A1 

Compatible with the Arduino Uno R3, the X-NUCLEO-IKS01A1 is a MEMS and environmental sensor board designed for the STM32 microcontroller. It features a 3-axis gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, as well as a humidity, temperature, and pressure sensors. There are plenty of potentially creative and innovative uses of this device for wearables.

 

X-NUCLEO-IKS01A1. Image courtesy of ST


IRIS

The IRIS is an 18mm x 20mm x 3mm "cloud-on-a-chip" device with certified Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n), PCB Antenna (gain: 2 dB),  UART interfacing, and can support over-the-air upgrades. This could prove very useful for a variety of IoT applications.

 

The IRIS. Image courtesy of EBV Elektronik.

 

Home Connect Program

The Home Connect Program is a platform to simplify the creation of smart homes or other smart environments by connecting IoT devices for innovative uses. If you already have a variety of IoT devices available, this could be a good tool for coming up with new ways to interface them together for home-automation or smart-city applications.

 

BSH Home Connect Program. Image courtesy of BSH.

Past Winners of the IoT/WT World Innovation Competition

If you are curious about what kind of submissions are made to the IoT/WT World Innovation Competition, here are a couple of highlights from the past that might inspire you:

 

Recon Instruments

Recon Instruments is a Canadian company started as an MBA project. The company specializes in wearable displays and smartglasses for high-intensity environments, such as sports. Their claim to fame is releasing a heads-up display providing GPS maps, notifications, and other live metrics to the wearer in 2010—a year and a half before the Google Glass was announced.

In 2015, Recon Instruments was acquired by Intel, although this summer Intel announced it would be discontinuing the Recon lineup of products.

 

Recon Instruments heads-up-display for sporting environments. Image courtesy of Recon Instruments.

 


SigFox

SigFox is an IoT company based out of France with a specialization in low-energy cloud connectivity (LPWAN). Before entering the competition, SigFox had secured $150 million in funding from the financial sector and chip manufacturers after having only been around for four years.

SigFox continues to operate today with firms in North America, Europe, and Australia, and is used in industrial, scientific, and medical settings.

 

Image courtesy of SigFox

With IoT and wearable devices being used in increasingly innovative ways, it will be interesting to see what submissions come out of the 2016/2017 IoT/WT World Innovation Competition this November. If you're going to submit, you should get going!

Feature image courtesy of Innovation World Cup Series.