The Data for Children Collaborative with UNICEF took part in NTT Data’s 10th annual Open Innovation Contest on the 2nd December.

Held in the Bayes Centre at the University of Edinburgh, the competition encouraged new start-ups across a wide range of technological fields to pitch why they should be selected to move to the next round in Tokyo and secure funding for their project.

The evening saw a great selection of start-ups take to the floor; responding to challenge areas set by NTT Data such as healthcare and life sciences, data logistics, smart automation and disruptive social innovation.

The shortlisted start-ups included the joint winners Anomalous Technologies and Unmanned Life, as well as Topolytics, NewsBlocks, Shoppa, Ocyan Cloud Technology, KareInn, BlueFlow and The Bot Platform.

Our delivery director Alex Hutchison presented a strong pitch, highlighting how we are looking to be innovative with our data science techniques in order to accelerate efforts to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Our key message: we want to successfully deliver a wide portfolio of projects that will use data to improve outcomes for children both here in Scotland and all around the globe.

The judges were so impressed by the inspirational and important work that we are doing at the Collaborative that we were awarded the ‘Sustainable Development Goals Award’ at the event. This recognised the great potential that the Collaborative has to achieve meaningful impact through data driven social innovation.

We are very grateful for this acknowledgement, and had a great time learning from the other start-ups about their current projects.

You can find out more about the contest at the website:

http://oi.nttdata.com/en/contest/10th/locations/