School of Engineering (SENG) members have achieved outstanding results in the 6th Annual HKUST One Million Dollar Entrepreneurship Competition, with the top three winning teams all include SENG students or alumni. This year, HKUST expanded the One Million Dollar Entrepreneurship Competition from Hong Kong to a total of five cities. The competition, which over the years has fostered the entrepreneurial spirit on the campus, motivated over 500 teams from Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Macau and Hong Kong to join the contest.

As a forerunner to promote innovation and entrepreneurship, the competition has eventually grown from a platform to nurture promising entrepreneurs at HKUST, into a regional contest that instills entrepreneurial culture and promotes exchange of ideas among young innovators across the border.

Dr Steve Lee, Director of the Entrepreneurship Center, said he was glad to see the competition evolving into a regional innovation platform. “The competition provides a channel for young entrepreneurs to bring their innovative ideas from concepts to consumers, we are happy to see that it has grown in both scale and significance over the years, and we look forward to building this into an international platform.”

The top three winners of each city will compete in the Grand Final at HKUST Fok Ying Tung Research Institute in Nansha, Guangzhou, on 6 August. Sundial Technology, NeoForest and Perfuso, the champion, first runner-up and second runner-up respectively of the competition at HKUST, will compete in the final round.

Sundial Technology, formed by three SENG students and one student from the Business School and advised by Prof Zhiyong Fan from the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering (ECE), won HK$300,000 in cash award with an anti-reflection and self-cleaning film for solar panel. The team estimated the cleaning of dirty solar panels claims about HK$15.6 billion in monetary term and 90 billion kilowatt-hour of energy in Mainland China every year, and they said the nanomaterial film they invented would offer a solution to such huge losses in cost and efficiency. The team was also awarded the Innovation Prize and the Student Prize. The three SENG students in the team are Alessandro Calo’ in MPhil Program in Technology Leadership and Entrepreneurship (TLE), MPhil student Kwong Hoi Tsui and undergraduate Wing Yi Chak, both from ECE.

NeoForest, the first runner-up of the competition, developed a novel air purifier that promises to pump fresh, forest-grade air into an indoor environment. That was achieved by using microalgae instead of filters, which performs photosynthesis that could generate oxygen and clean up carbon dioxide, on top of air pollutants including particulate matter 2.5, formaldehyde, nitrogen oxide and sulphur oxide. The 3-member team includes two SENG alumni, namely Di Zhang, PhD in Bioengineering, and Yi Zhu, MPhil in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, as well as a student from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Meanwhile, the second runner-up Perfuso devised a technology that not only reduces the side effects for patients who undergo dialysis, but also halves the time and cost of the treatment and lowers the amount of the bio-waste generated. The team also won the Trade Show Winner Prize. The 5-member team comprises a good mix of SENG students, including Ye Tian in MPhil Program in TLE, undergraduates Po Sang Lo and Chun Ki Yeung, both Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBME), PhD student Yuhe Shang, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Xinzhu Liu, Dual Degree Program in Technology and Management. They are supervised by Prof Zhengtang Luo of CBME.

To learn more about the HKUST 2016 One Million Dollar Entrepreneurship Competition, please visit: http://onemilliondollar.ust.hk/2016/index.html