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Who is your favourite Hague Innovator?

DECEMBER 9, 2019
With The Hague Innovators Challenge, the municipality of The Hague challenges startups, scale-ups and students to present their innovative ideas for global issues, as described in the UN Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs). Over the last weeks, the nominees have been working hard on their business proposals and pitches with the help of Venture Academy. You can help your favourite nominee by voting on them for the audience prize. Giving them the chance to win another € 2.500.
Note: voting is only possible from December 16, 2019, until January 16, 2020. 

The winners will be announced at the Big Improvement Day on the 21st of January 2020. Check out the nominees below and vote on your favourite Hague Innovator!

Check out the 9 nominees below and vote here!

STUDENT CATEGORY 
Stove2.0

Sustainable cooking is essential to people’s lives. Today millions of households worldwide still cook with solid fuels like wood and coal. Indoor air pollution associated with cooking with solid fuels claims 4.2 million lives every year (World Health organization). Stove 2.0 is an affordable and efficient gas stove that reduces gas consumption by half. Through this reduction in fuel cost, we empower three billion people worldwide to transition away from cooking with solid fuels and lead a healthier life.

Spriet

Kids sit behind a screen too long, they become increasingly alienated from nature and the climate changes. These are the three most important challenges that Spriet wants to tackle. Spriet wants to help parents bring nature into their homes and in this way encourage children to wonder about nature. Spriet provides vegetable garden adventures for the (young) curious.

Let’s duct the Wind

Let’s duct the wind aims at finding energy solutions for homes and urban applications using an innovative wind turbine design. In this design, the turbine blades are enclosed in a cylindrical shaped encasing, which results in increased efficiency at lower wind speeds and reduced noise levels. The design has been extensively tested using computer simulations and wind tunnel experiments at TU Delft. Installing ducted wind turbines would definitely require an investment, but if shared with neighbours, it could light two to three houses in a cleaner and sustainable way.

STARTUP CATEGORY
Polariks

Over the next 30 years, we need to produce 50% more food to continue feeding the world’s population. This while the availability of resources such as water and agricultural land is only decreasing, and we often have to use pesticides and chemical aids. We need to produce more food with fewer resources, and this is only possible if we work with high precision. Polariks is a startup that develops a new sensor technology for agriculture, whereby the plant-needs of each individual plant are observed, unnecessary loss of harvest can be prevented and food quality can be optimized.

Circularise

Global supply chains are complex and non-transparent leading to harmful effects on the environment and affecting the wellbeing of people. Circularise is offering a blockchain based solution to bring transparency to global supply chains and empower businesses to move towards a circular economy. For manufacturers engagement with Circularise means increased material value and trust in your production, by adding material passports to plastic resin, textile yarn, additives and any other materials produced. For OEMs & brands, it helps on the road to achieving sustainability targets and a strengthened brand position, by revealing a product’s origin and its environmental impact. We piloted this solution with chemicals producers Covestro and Domo and are about to demonstrate it commercially. We are also starting workshops with BASF and are in early talks with other organisations ranging from brands to EU bodies to form a consortium to set up an open standard for sustainability and transparency in plastics.

Okuna

Okuna is a healthier, friendlier and safer social network. Designed upon the principles of kindness, tolerance, an ad-free, ethical business model and backed by over 2000+ people worldwide, it’s a daring effort to redesign social media as a positive influence in our lives and our society.

SCALE-UP CATEGORY
Upinion

No one can better highlight the problems of refugees than a refugee! However, no matter how nobly the SDG are deployed on “paying attention to the needs of disadvantaged and marginalized populations,” the refugee’s voice is not sufficiently taken into account here. Upinion is therefore committed to better coordinating the assistance given by aid organizations to refugees, while at the same time better-informing refugees personally and referring them to the right places for help. We do this with our technology that is able to process large amounts of conversations (100,000 plus) via WhatsApp, facebook and upinionapp and to make the results available to NGOs and governments in real-time and at the same time via relevant platform also to share information with refugees.

The Young Digitals

Social enterprise The Young Digitals offers young people without a diploma and distance to the labor market a chance for a career as an online marketer. We do this in 3 steps:

  1. a free 10-week training program to become a digital marketer.
  2. Valuable work experience: young people who have successfully completed the training are employed by us to put their digital skills into practice. Under the guidance of experienced professionals, they start working at our office with online marketing assignments.
  3. Secondment: young people with knowledge and work experience are placed with a new employer
WellDecommissioned

We have at least 2 million open oil and gas wells on our planet. In the coming 20 to 30 years we will transform from fossil fuels to cleaner forms of energy. So we are going to say goodbye to all these wells, and a major clean-up is needed. An enormously complex and expensive job, where delay is already an issue. WellDecommissioned has developed software to tackle the dismantling or reuse of oil and gas wells and the associated installations faster and better. This is now becoming an export product, which offers opportunities for Dutch companies, particularly in the maritime sector.