Innovators secure investment at i3P Spark Awards
I3P has launched the i3P Spark Awards, providing businesses an opportunity to win financial investment to support their innovative ideas and projects.
Billed as the biggest innovation opportunity of the year? i3P Spark Awards is the industry-wide live investment event hoped to be an annual celebration of the power of collaborative innovation across the infrastructure industry.
The Dragons’ Den style pitching event was held last month at London’s historic Tobacco Dock, within striking distance of Tech City and London’s financial hub.
The competition is for members to submit inspiring, disruptive industry-relevant ideas, worthy of investment of up to £100,000 to develop them. The first competition received 37 high-quality project applications, with the shortlisted 6 invited to pitch their ideas to a high profile panel and live audience.
One of the judges was Elspeth Finch MBE, Founder and CEO of Indigo&. She said: “i3P Spark is an huge opportunity to uncover new ideas and showcase the appetite for innovation and to address the major challenges facing the infrastructure industry. The quality of the applicants we’ve had has been exceptional. As a competition judge, we’re looking for the projects which combine ground-breaking technological innovation with sizable market opportunities, backed up with a high quality team of people to deliver those projects.”
The i3P platform was borne out of Crossrail’s Innovate18 programme which saw participants contribute to a shared pot- matched by Crossrail, to provide seed funding for innovative ideas. The concept so successful it has now been rolled over into the i3P platform.
“Crossrail, as far as I know, was the first project – as opposed to an ongoing company – that set up a structured approach to innovation,” says i3P chair and Tideway CEO Andy Mitchell.
i3P’s overall aim is to support a truly collaborative culture across infrastructure client organisations and their supply chains.
Winners – i3P Spark Awards
£50k to Atkins, Morgan Sindall and British Geological Survey collaboration. Open UK: Unlocking Ground Investigation Data.  This project will help share ground investigation data across the membership.
£35k to A Mott MacDonald, 3D Repo, Vinci Grand Projects, Costain, Tideway, Laing O’Rourke, Atkins, Balfour Beatty, Bentley Systems and HS2 collaboration. Safetİbase is a database system to share the health & Safety learning from reportable incidents.
£25k to Arup and Costain collaboration. Computer vision technologies for creating resilient infrastructure – Value to UK Plc construction sector. This project will use machine learning to develop better visual monitoring of asset condition.