The Digital Campus Challenge 2018 – and here are the winners!

How can we capitalize on the opportunities that arise from digitalization? What effects will these new digital technologies have? And how can they be leveraged in health care to improve people’s lives? Eight international teams of students and recent graduates presented their projects in the final elimination round of the Digital Campus Challenge - #dcc18.

Every single one of you here today is a winner. But at the end of the day, only three teams will have made it onto the podium and won a trip to Barcelona.

Before the pitches got started, there were some words of welcome from Saskia Steinacker, Bayer’s Global Head of Digital Transformation, and a keynote address from Eugene Borukhovich, Global Head of Digital Health Incubation & Innovation at Bayer.

A few words from NYC to Leverkusen ...

Eugene then talked about the four Ps:

• Purpose
• Passion
• Perseverence
• People 

The running order of the teams was:

1. Infant Biodiagnostics
2. DNAnoTech
3. Circus Medicus
4. Eye-Lense
5. TANK-YU Charters
6. MEDICURE
7. miCODE
8. Les Pharmaciennes

And the winners are:

A baby pacifier that continuously measures health data – this is how the students on the Infant Biodiagnostics team envision the future. And maybe this idea will soon become reality. After all, the team was voted the first-place winner of the Digital Campus Challenge. Joao Alexandre de Oliveira had this to say:

“We now want to jointly develop and test a prototype with the experts at Bayer.”  

Second place went to the Circus Medicus team from Switzerland. The team members want to detect and track people’s movement disorders early on – by means of a measuring device worn around a patient’s ankle. Their goal is to collect a large volume of data and then use machine learning to identify irregularities.

Voted into third place by the audience was the idea submitted by the students on the miCode team. These young women aim to improve medical treatments by enabling patients to record their own health data. Their solution combined three products – a miCode digital tattoo equipped with a chip, a smartphone app that can scan the tattoo’s QR code, and an online platform for collecting the users’ data.

Tweet, Tweet, Tweet! The hashtag was #dcc18.

All three winning teams are being rewarded for their efforts with not only an opportunity to realize their ideas with Bayer, but also a trip to Barcelona. And the first-place team was presented with tickets to the Tech Open Air festival in Berlin. Saskia Steinacker is very impressed by the teams’ potential for innovation:

“The teams have shown us that we can be confident that we won’t have to worry about future generations of innovators.”

How the winners were chosen

A total of 346 teams from 60 countries - more than twice as many teams as last year and three times as many participants - all over the world took part in the Digital Campus Challenge. They were invited to submit entries in the categories Machine and Deep Learning, Gene Therapy, Precision Medicine and Workspace 5.0. After considering all the submitted ideas, a jury of more than 40 Bayer experts selected eight finalists – two in each category.

These teams then presented their ideas in the final round. The audience on site at the event and taking part via webcast decided on the winners. 531 votes were cast! They based their evaluations on the following criteria: innovation potential, customer focus, economic potential and presentation of the projects.

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I would like to thank Laura Mattner, a volunteer in the Communications department at Bayer Business Services, for allowing me to use her excellent follow-up report, and kudos to Christopher Schlieper for the pics of the event! 

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And in general: Thanks to all the participants and colleagues who made this challenge such a success. Thanks especially to the more than 40 judges and also to the mentors who prepared the eight teams for this event: Thanks for running that extramile.

And last but not least: Many thanks to my charming co-host Katharina Nagy, who was a tremendous help.