As part of Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW), an event that took place for the third year in a row at the Faculty of Economics in Split, from 17 until 19 November, we had the opportunity to attend the 24-hour Hackathon competition called Smart City Challange , which took place in by Locastic.

The Smart City Challenge competition was held under the auspices of the Split-Dalmatia County , organized by the Student Entrepreneurship Incubator, the Faculty of Economics in Split , the Split Entrepreneurship Center (PCST) and the Association of Information Technology Developers (UPIT) and LilCodeLab.

Participants had the opportunity in 24 hours to develop a solution (prototype) in one of the given challenges: Internet of Things (IoT), smart homes and buildings, smart transportation, smart production, smart environment, smart health, smart citizens.

The Smart City Challenge hackathon lasted 24 hours without a break, and the contestants had the task of developing a completely new solution in accordance with the rules of the competition. In order to enable the contestants to develop as well as possible from the idea to the project, the mentors guided them additionally with their knowledge and qualities. At the end of the competition, the teams successfully completed their task and had an additional 7 minutes of time at their disposal to win the favor of the expert jury and win their place among the top three teams. The competition normally has 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 the Student Entrepreneurship Incubator. On the other hand, it enables the participants to further develop the skills they acquired during their education, and directs them to further improvement through work on interesting and advanced projects. Our wish is that through a competition of this type, the participants will become familiar with the fundamental elements of the startup culture and develop their entrepreneurial spirit, so that they can more easily shape their ideas and develop them into a concrete project.

The prize fund, which was provided and awarded to the best teams by the City of Split , amounted to HRK 20,000.00 , and the best teams received direct entry into the entrepreneurial incubator and mentoring support.

Teams participated: the winning team “Lumos” presented a solution for wireless energy transfer in the field of public lighting, where the problem is to run power cables. The second-placed team “OrganoBox” presented a model of an automated grow box kit that facilitates and speeds up the cultivation of plants, primarily seedlings. In third place was the “BikePin” team, which developed a model of a bicycle anti-theft device based on NB-IoT technology. In addition to the awardees, it should be emphasized that the other teams also managed to develop a prototype within 24 hours, and in the competition we also had projects such as a system for reducing the consumption of street lighting based on traffic detection, a system for reducing the cost of garbage removal through the detection of container filling, an interactive mobile application for tourists whose purpose is to get to know the city through the elements of computer games etc.

During the competition, the competing teams had two mentoring sessions in which they received useful advice related to the technical and business side of the project’s feasibility through a conversation with the mentors. They participated as mentors Ivan Blažević (Blazing Edge company), Antonio Perić and Marko Maljković (Locastic company), Mateo Perak (Profico), Mario Francešević (Seak&Hit company), Ivan Blagdan (Convertiv company), Vedran Vukotić and Antonio Pavlinović (HR Cloud company), Ana Roje Ivančić (Ekobit company), Robert Bilić (Croativno company), Vanja Perić (Wealth Management Canada company) and Maja Čukušić and Ljiljana Najev Čačija (Faculty of Economics, Split)

The expert jury included: Đulijano Nola (co-founder of GoHome, CrnoJaja and GammaChef), Dario Boras (chief executive officer of Parklio) and Mladen Šimić (Cinnamon company).

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 .