Another edition of the Smart City Challenge hackathon is behind us, and the first in online form, using the MS Teams and Zoom platforms. At its core, the Smart City Challenge hackathon is a place where everyone interested in making their city a better place gathers in multidisciplinary teams to jointly build innovative solutions for smart cities.

The competition was organized by the Student Entrepreneurship Incubator of the Faculty of Economics , the Split Entrepreneurship Center and the Lil Code Lab company, and in cooperation with the City of Split , which once again provided a prize fund of HRK 20,000 for the best teams. Also, it is important to emphasize that the program was developed in cooperation with the project UIP – 2017 – 05 – 7625: User-oriented (re)design of processes and modeling of information systems on the example of smart city services , which was financed by the Croatian Science Foundation.

And how did everything look in practice? On Friday, the competitors and organizers gathered and the competitors were given detailed instructions related to holding the competition. The competition was officially opened on Saturday at 10:00 a.m. and the contestants had 24 hours to realize their ideas. During the day, two mentoring sessions were held during which competitors received useful advice from business and technical mentors to improve their technical and business models. The competition officially ended on Sunday at 10:00 a.m. and the presentation in front of the expert jury began at 12:00 p.m. Before the presentation of the solutions began, the mayor of Opara, Andro Krstulović, addressed all the competition participants, who encouraged and supported all the competitors in the hope that all the solutions will one day see the light of day and contribute to the welfare of society. The expert jury was made up of experienced entrepreneurs who evaluated the business side of the solution, consisting of Dario Boras (Parklio), Đulijano Nola (GammaChef) and Vedran Vukotić (Infobip) , while the technical side of the solution was evaluated by Lil Code Lab. The hackathon finalists who presented their solutions were: Electro team which was developing a platform for reporting communal problems for local self-government units, QR team who developed a solution for contactless menu and order review for catering facilities, the CBRO team who developed a collector of microplastics in the seas and oceans, UniCompoST who presented a solution for the disposal and processing of biodegradable waste from the public and economic sectors and the SanitetMe team which was developing a system for optimizing the use of medical and hospital vehicles. The teams had 7 minutes to present their solutions, and another 7 minutes for questions from the jury.

According to the evaluations of the jury, looking at the business and technical aspects, the UniCompoST team won . The second place went to the SanitetMe team, and the third to the Elektro team.

The mentors who guided the teams in the competition with their knowledge and experience are: Ivan Blažević (Rocket Insghts Croatia), Marko Maljković (Locastic), Robert Bilić (Croativno), Ana Roje Ivančić (Agilist), Antonio Pavlinović (Tripadvisor), Ljiljana Najev Čačija ( Faculty of Economics Split), Tea Mijač (Faculty of Economics), Michael Freer (Ensoco), Tomislav Zović (Klikeri), Ivana Bilić (Faculty of Economics Split) and Maja Ćukušić (Faculty of Economics Split).

The competition had a dual character. On the one hand, it provides an opportunity for teams to develop their idea and project with the help of excellent mentors, and later through the support of partners involved in the project.