Tackling Agriculture, Water and Cybersecurity Issues with Open Innovation

Published Apr-19-19

Breakthrough:
Decontaminating water through water shield technologies, an AI-driven, seed-centric data collection solution for farmers and other winning innovations at this two-nation hackathon.

Company:
The State of Andhra Pradesh, India

The Story:

 Tackling Agriculture, Water and Cybersecurity Issues with Open Innovation Andhra Pradesh, a state bordering India's southeastern coast has embarked on a number of open innovation initiatives during recent years. In 2016, it opened its first-ever open innovation center which is focused on the development of smart cities and has since hosted a clutch of open innovation hackathons.

With eyes firmly set on the future and with the intention of encouraging and inspiring young entrepreneurs Andhra Pradesh organized a hackathon to solve problems in agriculture, internet safety and water supply.

The Sunrise Open Challenge Hackathon (SOCH) was a two-nation hackathon, between India and Israel and focused on three challenges:

Agriculture: digitizing the seed distribution process between the farmer and the source to reduce manual intervention, increase transparency and to make the process run more smoothly.

Drinking Water: find measures to prevent people from suffering kidney diseases and other health issues due to the water supply.

Cyber Security: to develop a platform for cyber experts in Israel to train law enforcement agencies in India to deal with cybercrime.

Two-Center Hackathon

Hackathons were held in both India and Israel where for 30 hours startups, entrepreneurs and students from both countries worked on their potential breakthrough concepts.

The winners from India were:

Headrunners in the cybersecurity vertical for an intelligent chatbot that uses visualization to identify threats and sends reports and graphs to users.

The winner of the drinking water challenge was Jalsoftner, an electronic water conditioner with activated filter media. It neutralizes the bonding ability of minerals in the water with a series of controlled modulating high-frequency waveforms.

Urban Straw picked up the prize in the agriculture category. The innovation is an AI-driven, seed-centric data collection solution that helps farmers with marketing, subsidy, insurance and credit. The intention is also to integrate stakeholders such as farmers, seed distribution centers, government institutions and others under one platform.

The winners from Israel were:

The cybersecurity challenge was won by Shaul Rom, the founder and owner of RealiteQ for a cloud/internet-based supervisory control and data acquisition system that enables the modification of Internet of things (IoT) technology with cloud computing.

The winner of the water security vertical was a startup called Aquallence for disinfecting and decontaminating water through water shield technologies that use ozone-based technology and extreme low energy to remove viruses, bacteria, lead, mercury, chlorine and more.

Noga Bashan won the agriculture category for a technology that reduces chemical fertilizer use by 30-50%.

Turning Ideas Into Action

In addition to sharing a prize pool of the equivalent of $130,000, the winners were given opportunities to work with established companies to put their pilot projects into action.

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