Winners of the ARRISCA C 2024 competition announced

The auditorium of the Figueira da Foz Business Incubator was the venue for the final meeting and awards ceremony of the ARRISCA C 2024 business idea competition, organised by the University of Coimbra (UC).

The event took place on 22 May and featured the pitch presentations of the finalist teams and projects in the four categories of the competition - Innovation, Junior Innovation, Social Innovation and Sustainability - with a short Q&A session by the jury at the end of each presentation.

MFIBRO, NanoDetec and ProBag came 1st, 2nd and 3rd respectively in the Innovation category. In the Junior Innovation category, the AMI project came 1st, the ADE project came 2nd and 3rd place was not awarded due to the absence of the team responsible for the Rettuiti project.

In the Social Innovation category, 1st place went to the Já'Toiço, meu filho project, 2nd place to the Farm Akademy team and 3rd place to the Informal Carer Passport project.

In the Sustainability category, 1st place went to the DyeLoop project, 2nd place to the GreenTag project and the third place award was subject to proof of absence by the Seenergy project.

The 12th edition of ARRISCA C received more than 100 applications and awarded more than €45,000 in prize money and services to the finalist teams. Physical or virtual incubation, specialised mentoring, organised accounting and a provisional patent application are some of the services offered by the competition.

The opening session included speeches by the Vice-President of the Figueira da Foz Business Incubator, Vitória Abreu, and the Rector of the University of Coimbra, Amílcar Falcão. The round table on "The Impact of Social Entrepreneurship" was chaired by Carla Duarte, Innovation Manager at Instituto Pedro Nunes, Filipe Almeida, President of Portugal Inovação Social, and João Malva, Coordinator of the CHAngeing project. Joana Pires Araújo, co-founder and executive director of Coimbra Cooletiva, moderated the debate.

The Director of Santander Universidades, Inês Gouveia, and the UC Pro-Rector for Entrepreneurship, Gabriela Fernandes, closed the final session of the ARRISCA C Awards.

ARRISCA C is a business idea competition organised by the University of Coimbra, now in its 11th edition, which rewards business ideas based on science and technology at a national level that have an impact in different areas. The competition aims to contribute to creating academic and business spin-offs and start-ups.

_{English translation: Diana Taborda}