Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Top NI talent search is back with a bang
NORTHERN Ireland’s competition for innovative start-ups and entrepreneurs is back with brand new awards categories and bigger cash prizes for winners
INVENT 2021 is officially open for applications with an increased prize fund of £47,000 and a £25,000 first prize for the overall winner.
Organised by science and technology hub Catalyst with headline partner Bank of Ireland, INVENT is an annual celebration of the brightest new business ideas in the region which supports, showcases and rewards the local innovations and proof of concept ideas that have the greatest commercial potential.
Categories for this year’s awards have been refreshed to resonate with global trends and help capture great ideas from across the full spectrum of innovation in Northern Ireland.
The new categories include
Greentech, for products, solutions and tech that enable a sustainable future; a Health and Wellbeing category for ideas that improve quality of life through pushing the boundaries in life sciences, as well as a product category, celebrating physical products designed for innovative solutions. There are also separate categories for business and consumer software.
Each INVENT category winner will receive £5,000, an increase from £3,000 in previous years. The overall winner will take home an additional £20,000. Additional prizes of £1,000 will be awarded to the best student application and the best elevator pitch delivered on the night of the INVENT Awards on September 30.
The competition last year attracted applications from more than 100 talented innovators and saw 12 finalists chosen to compete for prizes at the INVENT final. And more than 1,500 people from around the world tuned into last year’s awards night streamed live from the ICC Belfast.
The overall winner was KLAS-PDT Technology, which has developed a peptide based non-invasive therapy for metastatic melanoma, a type of skin cancer.
It is used alongside current immunotherapies to increase their effectiveness at a reduced cost to the provider and less toxicity for the user.