Remember when…

Text: Anna Celli

… the teams received a challenging assignment

The first edition of the ReThink Waste Challenge focused on bringing new and innovative solution to the biobased circular economy. In short, the proposed innovations should provide an approach to prevent, reduce, reuse, recycle or recover biomass side-streams. The participants were tasked with the arduous assignment of identifying a market for the proposed product and producing convincing prove that the innovation is viable, original and fills an existing gap in the industry. Fortunately, participants were assisted, coached and advised by a diverse network of coaches from 26 different partner companies who provided essential expertise and support to the teams. Moreover, participants were offered tailored trainings and workshops to achieve the best possible results by challenge organizers, WUR Student Challenges.

…The Challenge button went off for the first time

The Challenge kicked off on 18 January on WUR campus and was live streamed worldwide. Over 70 people participated in person and around 50 joined it online. The kick-off was a joyous event with a variety of activities and speakers sharing their personal experience with the Challenge and biobased economy. After the event, students took part in Sprint 1, an entrepreneurial training organized in collaboration with WUR start up incubator, Starthub. The Challenge was joined by 190 students in 33 different countries.

…we had to say goodbye to some teams

After almost two months of hard work, the teams delivered their first milestone report where they explained their ideas and highlighted how their innovation solves the problem of waste. Of the 27 teams, 18 made it to the next round and had a chance to make it to the finals. The selection was a difficult process, but according to Frank Mejier, Senior Food Designer at IFF and selection committee member: “When the students put the whole picture together, waste suddenly seems to be worth gold. Still with this nice feeling of doing more good for the planet”.

…we learned and had fun together

During the course of the Challenge, participants participated in Sprints, full day of entrepreneurship trainings and fun activities to get to know each other. The events took place in WUR Student Challenge’s Exploration Space in Plus Ultra II and were also livestreamed for participants abroad. Dingming from team Live Twice commented about Sprint 3: “I learnt quite a lot. We learnt how to validate our ideas and our assumptions with appropriate tools and were able to ask some questions to two brilliant companies”. In addition to the Sprint days, participants had the option to join a few workshops on the topics of personal branding, patents, pitching and prototyping. Coaching by the Challenge’s network of partners was also prominent: two online consultations events were organized as follow up event to the Sprint days. Muskan Mathur found these events incredibly helpful to the process of her team BB&B. “Every time we talked to the partners we got little bits of useful information and practical questions that we hadn’t thought of.”

…we finally found out who our finalists were

On 1 June, The finalists of the challenge were announced. After 2 months of hard work, the teams delivered their second milestone complete with an artist impression of their idea and a social media pitch. The finalists had then some time to perfect their pitches before entering the dragon’s den with the Jury at the Grand Finals on 21 June.

…the finalists came to Wageningen to enter the dragon’s den

During this full day event on Wageningen Campus, the finalists entered the dragon’s den and discussed their project with our Jury. The finalists were also given a chance to pitch their ideas to the audience to win the audience award. During the award ceremony the top 3 teams were announced and we also got to hear from some inspiring speakers: Ugne Dirdaite, EU Bioeconomy Youth Ambassador and Cees Leeuwis, professor of Collaborative Research, Communication and Change. After 6 months from the start of the challenge, the winner of the ReThink Waste Challenge was finally announced: Congratulations team Afterlife!