The Sustainable University Innovation Awards receive more than 500 entries in its first edition

More than 500 works will be eligible for the University Sustainable Innovation Awards which, created jointly by Vocento and U4Impact (a platform for innovative TFGs of reference between university talent and companies), were created with the aim of giving visibility to Final Degree or Master’s Projects (TFG). /M) more sustainable and innovative and be a link between the university community and companies committed to change.

These awards, which in their first edition are sponsored by Iberdrola and the strategic collaboration of the Princess of Girona Foundation, are divided into five categories and seek to recognize projects that stand out for their contribution to impact. The winner of each category is eligible for a prize of €1,000. The awards will be presented on June 27, 2024 at 7:00 p.m. at the Vocento headquarters in Madrid.

In this first edition, a total of 528 works from all regions of Spain have been presented. The categories with the most nominations were Sustainability with 37% and Social Innovation with 23%. Health occupies third place with 18% of the applications, followed by New Technologies with 13% and Women STEM with 9% of the total works presented.

In the first phase, the projects will be analyzed by a technical committee made up of U4Impact members who will make a preselection of 20 candidates per category. After this first screening, throughout this month of June, a jury made up of specialists in the area or field of expertise corresponding to each category will choose the winners.

The jury of this first edition is composed: in the Sustainability category by Carlos Arango, general director of Dirse; Bel Barroso, doctor in Communication for Sustainable Organizations and Co-founder Cronopios; and Mónica Chao, founder and managing partner of ACATIVA and president of WAS. In the Social Innovation category are Arancha Martínez, co-founder and CEO of The Common Good Chain; Gemma Guzmán, Director of Talent at the Princess of Girona Foundation; and Sabina Lobato, director of Training, Employment and Operations and Studies at Fundación ONCE.

Itziar Areso, Senior Analyst, Opportunity Assessment Group at LifeArc; Isabel Caruana, founder and CEO of Ailin.health; and Lupe Martínez, medical director of Novartis; They make up the jury in the Health category. In the New Technologies category, the jury is made up of Elena de Benavides, Head of Corporate Venturing & Innovation Ecosystems at Elewit; José Manuel Mateu de Ros, founder and CEO of IQube; and Salomé Valero, Director of Innovation at Kyndrlyl. For their part, those in charge of deciding the winners in the STEM Woman category will be Blanca Drake, Head of Strategic Innovation Marketing at Telefónica Open Innovation; Marta Orduna, researcher in QoE for eXtended Reality at Nokia and Rocío Mendoza, journalist and head of the Anthropy Section.