Elevator division of United Technologies Corporation Otis in association with T-Hub, the tech incubator in the city, has announced Otis Innovation Challenge for start-ups.
Five start-ups are to be selected as part of the global competition seeking innovative solutions that can be integrated with elevators, escalators and travellators (moving walkways), a product line that has made Otis a household name.
Start-ups making the final cut would get an opportunity to collaborate with Otis to potentially enable innovative technology solutions at its facility in the city. They would also get a chance to scale-up by developing a proof of concept (PoC) of the prioritised solution with funding of up to $10,000 per start-up.
The challenge kick-started on Tuesday with a programme at T-Hub in which Industries and IT Secretary Jayesh Ranjan, UTC’s vice-president (engineering, innovation and research) Mary T. Lombardo and ED and head of UTC’s Hyderabad Research and Design Centre (HRDC) Prakash Bodla participated. The call for applications to participate in the challenge would be open till July 22. The short-listed start-ups would get an opportunity to present solutions to judging members on ‘Pitch Day’, which is scheduled to be held at the incubator on August 10. On the ‘Demo Day’, to be held in October, the start-ups would get to showcase their PoCs to executives of Otis and other UTC business units. The solutions should focus on the areas of passenger demand anticipation; data analytics of passenger; and smart interaction with other building equipment systems.
Technologies capable of using information sources such as cameras, sensors, schedules, real-time traffic, transit and weather forecasts to analyse data for Otis products are in demand for this challenge. Submitted solutions should be distinct and scalable and use low-cost general purpose computing, sensing and connectivity hardware, a release said.
T-Hub CEO Jay Krishnan said the challenge builds on the bond the incubator and the UTC forged last year. “UTC’s intent to continue partnering with us is both a validation of synergies in the deep tech space as well as a continued engagement from 2017. The launch of the Otis Innovation Challenge will provide a global scaling opportunity to start-ups and accelerate innovation for the elevator division of UTC,” he said.
Later, during an interaction with media, Ms. Lombardo said as part of engaging closely with the start-up ecosystem, setting up of an innovation hub at HRDC for the purpose is on the cards.
To start with, the proposed innovation hub would have a 8-10 member team, a number likely to be doubled soon. The team members, she said, would be taught to engage and work more closely with the start-up system. Singapore and Shanghai in Asia are the other locations where the UTC has such innovation hubs, created for shaping local and disruptive solutions.
On the HRDC, Mr. Bodla said 650 engineers were part of the global engineering centre in the city focused on embedded systems, control logics and software. Fifty more engineers are in the process of bring recruited, he added.
