August - 2017

The final pitch

The final pitch

After 23.5 hours of continuous work, only 30 minutes remain to present the results to more than 100 curious guests in the beautiful Forum Alpbach plenary. This is a big moment for all the teams. At the end of an event like this one question eventually pops up: what are the learnings? Let’s start with the company partners who 24 hours earlier presented real-life tasks for the student teams to work on. These are the concrete ideas and amazing concepts our passionate teams gene

It's the final countdown: only 6 more hours

It's the final countdown: only 6 more hours

Sometimes six hours feel like eternity. Compared to the initial time span of 24 hours and in combination with the pressure of finalizing the results 6 hours can also seem to fly. The last quarter of TU Austria’s Innovation-Marathon is all about wrapping up the results in prototypes, documenting and rehearsing for the final presentation and then entering the big stage to present 24 hours of work in 2 minutes – seems tricky, doesn’t it?

Diverse teams – diverse ideas

Diverse teams – diverse ideas

After the cup song, the teams are now diving into the phase of idea generation. At the beginning of this phase it is vital to collect as many ideas as possible and to think in broad terms. ‘Especially in the ideation phase a variety of cultural backgrounds, diversity in academic disciplines, a mix of men and women, younger and older team members contribute to diverse, unexpected and sometimes also crazy ideas’, Stefan from the innovation coach crew explains. This is a result

Forget coffee, do the cup song

Ten hours over – 14 more to go

Ten hours over – 14 more to go

What happened in those 10 hours? Innovation coach Julia explains the time-line of the marathon: ‘Our marathon is built up in two different but equally important phases: analysis and ideation. Until now our teams used their brainpower to dig deep into the challenge they have gotten from our company partners. Of great importance in the analysis phase is to clearly understand the customer’s needs. For this reason, our teams left their desks to go out and interview possible custo

The Innovation-Marathon Guest Book

The Innovation-Marathon Guest Book

Several guests came to visit the TU Austria Innovation Marathon and left inspiring words for the teams as well as for the marathon as an event. Director General Mag. Christoph Neumayer of the Federation of Austrian Indurstries said: ‘The Innovation-Marathon is a role model for real-life innovation processes. This is what makes the event so attractive. Just like the fact that the marathon considers all aspects necessary for innovation, starting from multi-disciplinarity to cro

Great support from our neighbors at the Alpbach Technology Forum: the Austrian Patent Office

Great support from our neighbors at the Alpbach Technology Forum: the Austrian Patent Office

Already last year the Austrian Patent Office and TU Austria’s Innovation-Marathon were neighbors at the Alpbach Technology Forum. What a fabulous coincidence! The Austrian Patent Office is the expert for research and is supporting our teams when it comes to different questions: has anybody else dealt with a similar question before? How have others solved tasks like ours? Source: Österreichisches Patentamt/APA-Fotoservice/Lackner One of the teams reports: ‘Our task is to find

Innovation coaches, the Innovation-Marathon-Codex, innovation methods, innovation everywhere :-)

Innovation coaches, the Innovation-Marathon-Codex, innovation methods, innovation everywhere :-)

Not only the teams, also the innovation coaches will miss their normal sleep routine at night helping the students to find the best solutions. But what exactly is the role of the coaches? Up front the coaches spend a lot of time planning and coordinating the Innovation-Marathon. During the marathon, they are here to support and coach both the teams and the company partners. They do this by explaining methods, providing templates and sharing their knowledge from their practica

GONG - the countdown starts

GONG - the countdown starts

GONG – this is the starting point! From now, 9:00 a.m. sharp, for 24 hours non-stop our eight teams will work on their tasks. But what are their tasks? Right after the gong, students and company partners gathered at their ‘work stations’ and the up-until-this point sealed envelopes were handed over – a picture that reminds a little of the Oscars – luckily no mistakes in Alpbach :-) The tasks are real-life challenges our companies are facing and they are as diverse as the comp

Kick-off of the TU Austria Innovation-Marathon 2017

Kick-off of the TU Austria Innovation-Marathon 2017

Today the eagerly anticipated kick-off of this year’s TU Austria Innovation-Marathon at the Forum Alpbach finally took place. Rector Kainz, chairman of TU Austria, opened the evening with a warm, encouraging speech before the word was given to around 70 people. A mix of students, participating company representatives and representatives of the universities mingled and introduced themselves in 4 rounds of ‘speed-talking’. No one wanted to stop chatting during this introductory

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