Best Pitch Award

The heart of the E&I Touchdown are the 30 innovation projects jointly conducted by the E&I Institute and practice partners such as Fraunhofer, Fujitsu and ÖBB TS. In our project courses, E&I students work together on innovative solutions ranging from identifying attractive application fields for new technologies, designing an technology scouting process or conducting competitor analyses. All results were pitched in just 45 seconds after Dr. Margarete Schramböck, Federal Minister for Digital and Economic Affairs, opened the live event with welcoming words.

The best pitches were selected by a jury of experts as well as the public. The jury members were Dr. Julia Bauer (Fraunhofer), Katharina Binder (The Ventury), Laura Egg (Austrian Angel Investors Association), Dr. Julian Fischer (Austrian Airlines), Georg Ioannidis (Uniqua Ventures), Nicole Stroj (Raiffeisen Bank International),) Georg Weber (primeCrowd), Hannah Wundsam (Austrian Startups) and Maria Zesch (Magenta).

The winner of the category "Best Pitch Bachelor" was the team around the startup “Magic Undershirt”. The magic undershirt provides a solution for everyone, who commutes to work by bike. Second place went to the team working for the ÖBB TS, analyzing how future jobs in the maintenance industry will look like and third place to Swappy (trading second-hand items as easy as never before).

In the "Best Pitch Master" category, LIT Water (a smart water bottle), Kachelino (a new modern stove) and Planeo (a digital entrepreneurship guide) took the top three spots.

The audience could also vote for their favorite pitch. The "Audience Award" went to the team of students who worked on how an innovative, contemporary credit card could look like for the Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI).

Other highlights of the program included the keynote speech of Benedikt Angerer, Business Developer at the Austrian-based fintech unicorn Bitpanda, and six workshops conducted with Accenture, Bitmovin, Darwin’s Circle, Dharma, LIMO Wardrobe and the WU Gründungszentrum. Moreover, the E&I Hackathon and the ECN’s “Hochschulgründerzeit” talk gave insights into the entrepreneurial scene around the E&I Institute.

This E&I Touchdown was supported by BCG and Accenture, accent, and the Vienna business agency.