The Hult Prize is a global social entrepreneurship competition that takes place every year. The best ideas are crowd-sourced by over 2000 colleges and universities worldwide to solve social problems with regard to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In cooperation with the United Nations, the winning team will receive USD 1 million in seed capital to help launch a social enterprise.

The Hult Prize On Campus program took place at WU from September to December 2019. A student Hult-initiative, supported by ÖH WU and WU Entrepreneurship Center, launched the program at WU. The program comprised talks and workshops about sustainability and shaping the future. In total 15 teams participated, whereas two winners emerged: TourneSol and Tomorrow’s genAIRation. These teams are admitted to participate in the Regional Summit Program, which takes place in spring 2020. Due to the current Corona situation, most of the summits were held virtually. The winning team Tournesol qualified for the Kuala Lumpur Regional and made it to the TOP 6 in the virtual program. This achievement enables the young team to enter the Startup accelerator program.

The winning project Tournesol (French: sunflower) was founded by three entrepreneurial WU Students from the English Bachlor Program: Mohamed Dhia Khalfallah, Ana Capuder and Mykhailo Sokolov. Tournesol is a young startup that aims to achieve sustainability and the development of clean technologies. The idea is to combine blinds and solar panels into a plastic window. The rotation of the PV blinds and the backup of the data is controlled via the TourneSol app. The aim is to solve problems such as energy independence for city dwellers, clean and sustainable energy supply and scarcity across the country. The result is an energy generation potential of 150 Wh per square meter, which can be compared to the energy supply of 30 glowing light bulbs or three computers at a time. TourneSol plans to create a niche in the global PV market, focusing primarily on architects and construction companies in Europe.