Last month on August 30th the winner of the A2 challenge 2011 ‘Crowdriding‘ was announced during the Grand Finale in one of the most historic buildings in Amsterdam ‘De Waag‘. What started as an initiative of Philips, Mediaguild and High Tech Campus Eindhoven has become one of the largest local business plan competition for talent in the Netherlands.

By bringing together technical and business talent  fragmented across the Dutch A2 high way road (which connects the 2 most prominent Tech melting pot High Tech Campus Eindhoven with the center for creativity, finance and business opportunities in Amsterdam), we aim to stimulate the level of innovation and entrepreneurship in this region. The participants were challenged to come up with new business ideas and innovations across four thematic streams: Consumer Lifestyle, Clean Tech and Energy, Healthcare and Media & Communication.

After 6 months of (pre)rounds, 47 ideas and 36 contestants; 5 concepts were nominated to pitch their business plan. With the support of their coaches including Roxann Paulson (CEO Philips Crystalize), Mayor of Appsterdam Mike Lee and myself, the teams had to convince the judges and a panel of early stage investors that their idea is viable and game changing. The major trend for Mobile Apps among this year’s submitted concepts for the Accenture Innovation Awards 2011 can also be seen in this year’s nominated concepts:

• Crowdriding: A mobile app that enables car drivers to offer their free car seats to hitchhikers against a small fee.
• Ideedock: An internal platform for organizations to stimulate innovation by challenging employees to come up with new ideas.
• QAS: An alarming system for earthquakes by installing high tech sensors in electronic devices.
• Shopylife: A mobile app combining social aspects with location based shopping with the possibility to tag and share stores and products with friends.
• Wiehaalt: A mobile app that let you easily contact your trusted network to pick up your child at the daycare when you’re not able to make it on time.

The Grand Finale

The evening started with a speech by Boudewijn Docter, founder of last year’s winning concept: Effect Photonics. With 6 people working on the project for over one year, he emphasized that winning the challenge was critical to lift off his project and opened many doors to attract sponsors and pilot customers.

Following, each of the 5 teams had to present their innovative and original business plan to convince the jury in order to win the prize incl. 5000 EUR, introduction to an exclusive network of entrepreneurs, investors and potential partners and media exposure. The jury consisted out of Roel van Summeren (Philips), Jelto Smits (Prime Ventures), Jasper Levink (Ttopstart) and Bart Fischer (Accenture) complimented all teams for their energetic, enthusiastic and professional presentations and high-quality business plans. After many critical question from the jury and the audience, the winner of the A2 Challenge 2011 was Crowdriding, praised for its scalable business model with clear focus on minimum requirements to launch and learn from the market.

“Crowdriding had a clear and staged to-do market strategy in a sizeable market, that may even be larger if platform technology is leveraged to alternative application areas.” said Roel van Summeren.

The startup that I coached personally – Ideedock – got the second price, which will still facilitate an accelerated growth of this technology startup. They have developed a smart cloud based platform to support Idea contests within organizations. I am very enthousiastic about their chances, as they have a couple of strong launching customers, and a very smart scalable model based on their hosted solution.

Inspired and challenged, this year’s edition has set the standards even higher for young talents in the Netherlands to participate next year in the A2 Challenge 2012.

To get a good impression of the evening, please click on the following pictures to view the full size image.