A look back at the first hackAtech Inria edition - Lille 2020

As part of Inria Startup Studio, the Inria Lille - Nord Europe centre has launched the first hackAtech: an innovation marathon, at the crossroads of a Startup Weekend and a technology hackathon.
Its goal? "Hacking" digital technologies to drive deeptech startup creations by relying on Inria's expertise.

If the hackAtech Sprint was a great moment of challenge, hackAtech started long before. From October, ideation workshops were offered, followed by project selection and preparation of the Sprint for the project leaders in conjunction with the research teams and the centre's innovation team, to the creation of the new "hacker" digital technologies to boost the creation of deeptech startups based on Inria's expertise.

From 5 to 7 March, the 116 participants in 14 teams developed the selected projects. Students, engineers, PhD students, entrepreneurs : the teams were multidisciplinary, allowing them to work on both the technological and business sides.

Thanks to the support of the coaches - the "technological referents", researchers and engineers who provided advice on technologies and expertise and the "innovation boosters" who advised on the business aspect - the teams were able to test the market and technological viability of their projects.

Relive the first edition of hackAtech on video :

After two days of work, the participants pitched their projects in front of the public and a jury composed of event partners and ecosystem stakeholders. After deliberations, the jury selected four winners.

Open challenge, two winners tied:

• ItOpiVo : team led by Guillaume Parisot.
  • Make the opinions of citizens, clients and consumers understandable by summarising them, thanks to the Magnet project team's expertise on the analysis of citizens' contributions to the open questions of the great debate.
• Data Fresh, team led by Pierre Galerneau and Martin Pennel.
  • Fighting food waste by using Modal project team's data classification technologie: Mixtcomp.

Partner challenge:

• Heimdall : project based on the problematic brought by OVHcloud.
  • Detecting customer sentiment and managing customer support to reduce attrition (or loss of customers) in businesses by using Mixtcomp technology. This project benefits from co-support with our partner OVHcloud.

Grand Jury Prize:

• Octo+ : Christian Duriez and Thor Morales.
  • A robotic arm to enable people suffering from reduced mobility to become more autonomous and mobile, based on research carried out in deformable robotics within the Defrost project team.

Following the Sprint, the hackAtech Inria - Lille 2020 edition is entering its last phase: project support. For the winning projects, support was launched in March 2020. In addition, some of the projects participating in the hackAtech Sprint, which were not winners, have also caught Inria's attention.

Other hackAtech editions will be organised in several Inria centres in the coming months.