FSU Jena success at 2018 Innovation Radar Prize of the European Commission
The European Commission has awarded Europe’s most promising digital innovations emerging from EU funded research and innovation projects. It is with pride that we would like to inform all colleagues, friends and alumni about success of Friedrich-Schiller-University JENA, one of FunGlass partner institutions, which participated and won the public vote! The awards ceremony took place at the European Commission’s ICT 2018 in Vienna, Austria on 6 December, 2018.
The Innovation Radar is an EC initiative to identify high-potential innovations and innovators in EU-funded research and innovation projects. 48 of the best EU-funded innovators have been identified through this initiative to compete with their EU-funded innovation in five categories for the Innovation Radar Prize 2018. These SMEs, university teams, spinoffs and start-ups reflect the diversity of EU-funded research and innovation and come from every corner of Europe.
The first stage of the competition took place over 2 weeks when the public could vote on the Futurium website for the innovators and innovations on the longlist that impressed them the most. Over 50.000 votes were cast by the public and selected the 20 finalists. The “final” took place in Vienna, where a panel of 4 judges decided the winners on the basis of a 3 minute pitch delivered during a special pitching session at ICT2018 .
With the result of 6276 people voting for their project LaWin Friedrich-Schiller-University JENA clearly qualified among the Top finalists in their category, Tech for Society, which aims to recognise new technologies impacting society and citizens, developed in EU-funded research and innovation projects.
The LaWin project was conducted to develop a new generation of materials by which buildings can be wrapped in a liquid layer. Large-area fluidic devices were produced for implementation with façades and smart windows by combining a series of novel glass processing technologies. Liquids, circulating within a building’s envelope, can be used for heating, cooling, insulating, shading, or changing the building’s color; the innovation developed is a large-area flat-panel heat exchanger realizing these functions in novel building designs, constructions and retrofittings.
The team, under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Lothar Wondraczek, consists of young researchers from 17 different nations collaborating on the development of new materials for energy efficient building envelopes and sustainable living, information display, communication, and green chemistry. With a primary focus on glasses, they strive to translate fundamental insights about the chemistry and the atomic structure of a material into everyday-products. From smart windows and containers to displays, touch panels and optical fiber, they advocate the current societal impact of glass materials.
Participation in Horizon 2020 provided the team with the unique opportunity to form a partnership of excelling strength and diversity, together with the means to establish serious processing capabilities such as those required in the development of real-scale demonstrators and testing scenarios, hereby taking ideas out of the lab. Through facilitation of cross-collaboration, they were able to benefit further from joint efforts in related projects, including the areas of life cycle analysis, strategies of exploitation, and new stimuli for spin-off technologies.
Congratulations to Prof. Dr. Wondraczek and the team for this important success and for winning the public vote!
Source: https://ec.europa.eu/
