Wärtsilä launches an innovation contest to find new and unique digital services for the marine industry.
The contest, named Wärtsilä Marine Mastermind, is aimed at start-up companies and entrepreneurs, in connection with the start-up event Slush. The winner will get to further develop the idea together with Wärtsilä's experts and Shift Actions, specialised in agile concept and product development.
With the innovation contest, Wärtsilä hopes to discover interesting digital business opportunities and to develop a new value adding digital service or solution. The winner also gets a chance to become part of the highly international marine business.
Innovation Lab
The contest started on 26 October, with more information available on the Wärtsilä website. In addition, Wärtsilä will tell more about the contest on stage at Slush's Clean Solutions event in Helsinki on 12 November, after which Wärtsilä will begin accepting submissions for the contest.
The winner of the contest will get to experience a thirty-day agile "Lean Innovation Lab" product or service development sprint supported by Shift Actions. The sprint is focused on the challenges of innovation, development of the concept for commercialisation, its prototyping as well as the business plan and its implementation plan. The goal is to use the concrete idea in the future together with Wärtsilä.
Usability and Business Potential
Key criteria for the submissions are usability of the solution within the marine business, innovativeness, customer focus and the business potential and scalability of the solution.
Submissions can be sent to Wärtsilä by 31 December 2015. The winner of the contest will be chosen by an international jury, which includes Wärtsilä's experts as well as distinguished representatives of the marine industry media, Wärtsilä's customer and capital investor as well as a start-up incubator.
The best ideas will be showcased to the jury in February. The winner will be announced in March 2016.
