The members of Team Alamat UP from the University of the Philippines-Diliman (Photo collage from THEPHILBIZNEWS)
By Alithea De Jesus
Proving that the recent jumped of the Philippines in the Global Innovation Index by 4 notches and now in the top 50 in the world, Filipino innovators are truly ready to seize the world.
Team Alamat UP from the University of the Philippines-Diliman was crowned as the global champion of Shell’s Pitch The Future beating 130 entries from across the world.
The Shell’s Pitch the Future is a virtual competition that is part of the world’s leading student engineering competitions, the Shell Eco-marathon. It is a series of competitions that brings students from all over the world to solve real-world energy challenges.
The student team, which includes students from a range of disciplines, won the ‘Tracking and Reducing CO2 Emissions from Vehicles’ challenge, supported by Microsoft. For the challenge, the team had to design an inclusive system prototype that can be fitted into a passenger vehicle to track and virtually share CO2 emissions from cars globally, also providing suggestions on how to reduce emissions from driving. The team presented its ideas live to a panel of industry experts, and highlights from the pitches can be found here.
Norman Koch, Global General Manager, Shell Eco-marathon, said: “We congratulate Alamat UP for winning one of the categories in our inaugural Pitch the Future competition. They brought great energy, innovative thinking, and creativity to the competition and the judges were extremely impressed with their idea.
“I am proud of everyone involved in the Pitch The Future competition. The team here at Shell worked tirelessly to ensure it could go ahead in the new normal and allow students from around the world to apply their STEM skills and passion to some of the world’s most pressing energy challenges.”
A summary of the Alamat UP team’s idea can be found here.
More than 130 teams from across Asia, Europe and the Americas submitted entries for one or more Pitch the Future challenges. A total of 13 teams were selected to advance to the finals in four challenge categories, with three finalists in each category and a wild card entry for best newcomer team in e-mobility challenge. In addition to the Tracking and Reducing CO2 Emissions from Vehicles category, challenges included Electric Vehicle Battery Recharging, with Shell Recharge, Decarbonising the Home, with Shell Energy; and Decarbonising Road Freight Transport, with Shell Lubricants. Shell also partnered with Adobe to offer participating teams access to Adobe Creative Cloud for six months, and with Shell’s NXplorers team to host webinars to help teams think through best practices for problem-solving.