From flat-pack wind turbines to high-speed phone chargers: student teams showcased novel product ideas as part of Imperial's innovation challenge.

The Imperial Startup Showcase, held last week, highlighted seven of the most promising ideas to emerge from the Venture Catalyst Challenge– the College’s flagship innovation contest.

Over six weeks teams of students were tasked with finding commercially-viable solutions to real-world problems and growing these ideas into startup businesses. Over 400 attendees, including scores of investors, gathered at the Showcase to watch seven student teams pitch their products to a panel of judges.

The winning team, Eddy, took home the £10,000 prize for their prototype of a revolutionary home sensing system.

Their product uses novel listening technology to capture and interpret mechanical waves in space – including footsteps, running water and other background noise – and uses this information to work out what is going on within a house.

Team-member Thomas Tredinnick, a postgraduate student on the Innovation Design Engineering Programme, explained: “By listening to the sounds in your house, the device can determine if you’ve left a window open or forgotten to turn off the gas when you go out. It can then send a notification to your smartphone to remind you to go back and sort it out.”

“At the moment this sort of comprehensive and intelligent monitoring would require lots of individual devices, so we wanted to find a more efficient solution that would just require one.”

“We’re looking forward to pumping the prize money into fine-tuning the product technology and developing a viable prototype for investment over the next few months.”

The Venture Catalyst Challenge is the brainchild of Imperial Create Lab – a College initiative managed by Imperial Innovations and Imperial students which brings together innovators, investors and experts to cultivate entrepreneurship across the Imperial community.

Throughout the Challenge, teams had access to expert led workshops and high profile mentors to help them get their ideas up and running.

Thomas added: “The whole process has been a great experience. We’ve had the opportunity to work with some fantastic mentors who have offered invaluable advice and really helped us define our vision, while opening our eyes to challenges we could face and how we might overcome them. It has been a steep learning curve, but one that will really benefit us as we move forward with the product”

Deserving winners

Kelsey Lynn, Director of Technology Ventures at Imperial Innovations and one of the judging panel, said: “The Eddy team impressed us with the strong, well investigated science underlying their idea, the potential for their product to disrupt a significant emerging market in home security and the eager, determined and thoughtful attitude of the student entrepreneurs.”

Dominic Falcão, Manager of Imperial Create Lab, added: “The calibre of entrants to this year’s Venture Catalysts challenge was exceptionally high, and we are thrilled to see how far the teams have come in just six weeks.

“Many of the teams actually developed their ideas as part of their courses at Imperial. It’s great to see departments encouraging this problem solving approach and firing students’ imaginations.”

“Eddy are deserving winners, chosen because they combined commercial mindedness with creative engineering intuition. We look forward to seeing their product continue to develop.”

Read Imperial Create Lab's blog post about the Startup Showcase.

A slideshow photos from the Startup Showcase