London’s budding student entrepreneurs will battle it out today, Tuesday 27th May, in ‘Dragons’ Den’ style to become the Mayor of London’s Low Carbon Entrepreneur of 2014.
In front of a live audience at City Hall, finalists will pitch their green business ideas to a prestigious panel of judges including Deborah Meaden and Innocent Drinks founder Richard Reed in the hope of winning the £20,000 prize to help take their idea to market. Other judges on the panel will include UK CEO of Siemens Roland Aurich, politician and environmental journalist Zac Goldsmith MP, and Environment and Energy Advisor to the Mayor of London Matthew Pencharz.
Ten ideas have made it onto this year’s shortlist, from a modular smart watch that can evolve and would never need to be replaced, to a high tech urban food farm, carbon fighting super heroes, solar powered mobile phone charging phone boxes, and using commuters and Tube trains to transport goods. The students faced stiff competition with hundreds of ideas submitted to reduce London’s energy use, and help shape their future world.
The winning idea will be announced by the Mayor at an awards ceremony, hosted by sponsors Siemens, at the Siemens Crystal on Wednesday 4th June.
The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, said: “With such a fantastic array of innovative and wonderful ideas concocted by our young entrepreneurs, some very tough decisions will need to be made and I don’t envy our judges in this difficult task. Today’s ideas could go on to become the electric cars or solar panels of the future and it is students like these that will go on to help foster jobs and growth in the capital’s green economy for years to come.”
London is already at the heart of innovation and development for green technologies and the city’s booming green economy is already worth more than £25bn. The Mayor’s competition, now in its third year, aims to encourage continued investment in low carbon technologies in the capital and to engage students in helping to solve the carbon problem and create a more sustainable future.
Kirsty Kenney and Harold Craston, Geography final year students from LSE who have enterd their idea ‘SolarBox’ said: “We are absolutely thrilled to be finalists in this competition. Our project is ten months in the making and this provides a fantastic opportunity to get feedback from peers, experts and the public.”
Omer El Fakir, a student at Imperial College who is part of the BLOCKS team with their idea for a modular evolving smart watch said: “We are incredibly excited to be in the finals of the Low Carbon challenge. Our dream is to inspire a shift towards modular electronic devices in wearable technology, which will result in minimal waste and limit carbon dioxide emissions from manufacturing. We are determined to impress the panel of judges in the final pitch and are working hard every day to make BLOCKS a reality.”
Judge and leading businesswoman Deborah Meaden said: “It’s always fantastic to see such creativity and entrepreneurial drive from London’s students. We’ve seen some brilliant ideas come out of this competition and this year will be even better.”
The shortlisted entries hope to follow in the footsteps of Will Hines and Rachel Clemo who won last year’s prize with their idea Reseed to provide an alternative to paper receipts and are in discussions with technical partners to make their e-receipt concept a success. 2012 winner Arthur Kay, with his innovative ‘bio-bean’ concept, is now setting up a major processing plant in London to convert used coffee grounds into bio-fuel by the end of the year. Competition sponsor Siemens gave every applicant the chance to be considered for up to 6 paid internships within their business.
Roland Aurich, Chief Executive of Siemens in the UK and Ireland said: “I am looking forward to taking part in this year’s Mayor’s Low Carbon Entrepreneur Prize judging panel. The ‘Dragons’ Den’ style pitching process promises to be both a challenging and exciting way for the short-listed candidates to explain their ideas. I wish all the participants the best of luck.”
Notes to editors
Low Carbon Entrepreneur 2014 judging panel:
• Deborah Meaden, Dragon’s Den Entrepreneur
• Richard Reed, Co-founder of Innocent Smoothies
• Roland Aurich, UK CEO of Siemens
• Martin Powell, Head of Urban Development, Siemens
• Zac Goldsmith MP, politician, environmental journalist
• Matthew Pencharz, Environment and Energy Advisor to the Mayor of London
• Dom Anderson, NUS VP society and citizenship
The shortlisted student ideas being pitched to the judges:
BLOCKS Imperial College London By Omer El Fakir, Serge Vasylechko, Alireza Tahmaseb Zadeh, Karl Taylor, Hakeem Javaid, Andrey Antyufeev A modular smartwatch that can evolve with advances in technology and to meet the changing needs of the consumer. Composed of easily assembled and replaceable modules that each carry out a different function, designed to last, and never be thrown away.
Paper Craze London South Bank University By Zack Daniels, Alex Pullen A concept to install magazine holding infrastructure on London tubes as a more formal way of sharing daily free newspapers.
Crowd Power Plant Imperial College London By James Winfield, Dominic Jacobson An online crowd marketplace to connect producers and consumers of electricity. This idea aims to revolutionise the energy market and encourage the uptake of green technologies, incentivise renewable investment and decrease 'pay back' times.
Light-Fi Imperial College London By Alex Bak, Michele Serri A way to integrate the lighting infrastructure of London's office buildings within the intranet to make it fully automated. No lights will be left on again.
London’s Food Farm University of Greenwich By Arturas Niemcinskas, Aleksandra Gajda, Andrew Ndungu A sustainable technologies food farm growing produce within the urban environment.
The Energy Defenders Imperial College London By Jonathan Crawford, Emma Dixon, Mo Alemohammed, Oliver Bauer, Ewan Armstrong, Madeleine Alexander, Ravina Bains New cartoon superheroes uniting to fight their common enemy, Carbon. The Energy Defenders are designed to influence the habits of the next generation and encourage responsible energy use.
SOLO (Social Logistics) Royal College of Art By Giulio Ammendola, Seungyeon Ryu, Leo Green, Miki Asatani SOLO (Social Logistics) is a crowd sourced courier service, turning the swarm of commuters into an army of couriers. SOLO takes polluting vans off the road and puts money back into tube travellers’ pockets, delivering at a time that suits you and a price that makes everyone happy.
Tube based rapid delivery system University of West London By Michael Barsties A concept to use the existing Tube system to transport goods during off-peak hours removing traffic from the roads and therefore reducing air pollution.
Dumb Barge > Smart Infrastructure London Metropolitan University By Lee Wilshire A proposal to reuse existing resources (dumb barges) to quickly create new recycling facilities (smart infrastructure) and enable more efficient waste collection by water.
SolarBox London School of Economics and Political Science By Kirsty Kenney, Harold Craston A concept to transform London’s disused telephone kiosks into solar powered public charging points for smart phones by installing carbon neutral panels which can also carry advertising.
• For more information on the competition, please visit: https://www.london.gov.uk/priorities/environment/mayors-low-carbon-entr…
• The Low Carbon Prize has been made possible thanks to sponsorship from Siemens and the support of the London Universities Environment Group (LUEG) who are helping to deliver the scheme by processing applications and promoting the award to London's students.
• Siemens is a global engineering company with a focus on the key sectors of Energy, Industry, Healthcare and Infrastructure & Cities. The Crystal, a Siemens initiative based in London, is an innovative visitor attraction and home to the global centre of competence for cities. For more information visit: www.siemens.co.uk and www.thecrystal.org
• The competition offered students the chance to be shortlisted for a paid internship with sponsors Siemens, as well as the winner’s prize to help turn their plans into commercial reality with cash and practical support. Last year Will Hines and Rachel Clemo won with their idea Reseed to provide an alternative to paper receipts and are in discussions with technical partners to make their e-receipt concept a success. 2012 winner Arthur Kay, with his innovative ‘bio-bean’ concept, is now setting up a major processing plant in London to convert used coffee grounds into bio-fuel by the end of the year.
For media enquiries please call Matt Keegan or Jessica Roscoe in the Mayor’s Press Office on 020 7983 4161/4716 or 07920458157/ 07795 127 466 For out of hours media enquiries please call 020 7983 4000. For non-media enquiries please call the Public Liaison Unit on 020 7983 4100.