Press Releases

• The three challenges regard Technology for Inclusion, Circular Economy and Information Segmentation
• Applications are open until November 12

The applications for Big Impact – the entrepreneurship competition promoted by Vodafone Portugal and Cascais’ Town Hall, in partnership with Visão magazine and organized by the innovation consultancy imatch – are now open. The successor of Big Smart Cities is looking for innovative projects that benefit society through technology in all of its components: social, technological, economic and environmental.

This new approach arises from Vodafone Group’s commitment to improve the life of ten million people around the world through an increasingly digital and inclusive society, respectful of the planet we live in. In Portugal, Big Impact is one of the projects that will contribute to that end.

The competition will have three challenges, each one associated to a different partner of the competition:

• Enabling People (Vodafone) – How to use the entrepreneurial ecosystem and technological innovation, making it accessible to all, in order to build an inclusive and digital society.
• Renewing Ecosystem (Cascais’ Town Hall) – How to enable people to adopt solutions of reintroduction in the consumption cycle, enhancing circular economy.
• Empowering Society (Trust in News) – How to improve access to information, enabling society through a transparent and personalized content curatorship.

The applications shall present technological solutions that improve people’s lives, in agreement with the challenges laid down by the partners, and can be submitted until the 12^th of November at bigimpact.pt.

After the applications process, five finalists per area will be selected, and they will have to present their projects during a two days hackathon in December. Afterwards, there is a nine months period for the pilot development, which will have to be ready to be presented and tested in September 2020. All winners will count on the partners’ support in the development, trial and release stages, assuring the success of the winning ideas.

Created in 2013 to capture technological ideas for which the goal is to improve the day-to-day of whoever lives, works or visits a city, this is an initiative that propelled projects such as Rnters (that allows the renting of goods, promoting a circular economy and preventing waste), Pavnext (intelligent pavement that slows down vehicles in a safe way, saving the energy that comes from the deceleration to produce electric energy) and BeOn (microinversor conceived to connect a photovoltaic system directly to a plug).

Big Impact is one Vodafone Power Lab’s initiatives, the innovation and entrepreneurship program that Vodafone Portugal started in 2009. Its goal is to foment the creation of technological projects in the telecommunications sector, through the support of incubation, mentoring, workshops and education, giving the necessary work conditions to these new enterprises so that they can develop themselves.