Finalists Announced For €1m SFI Innovator Prize

The final six teams competing for the €1million SFI Future Innovator prize have been announced following a rigorous international review.

The six teams aim to address a number of societal challenges through the development of novel, potentially disruptive, technologies. A novel aspect of the programme is the requirement for a Societal Impact Champion to be part of the leadership team. The key role of this champion is to provide a strong societal perspective for the team as they develop their solution.

An overall winning team will be announced in December and will receive a prize award of €1 million, providing the opportunity to deploy an innovative solution with potential to deliver significant impact to Irish society.

The challenge areas and issues to be addressed by the six finalists are as follows:

• Reducing the burden of sepsis

• Enabling next generation biological imaging

• Enabling better breast cancer diagnosis

• Reducing the burden of chronic pain

• Minimising hospital waiting lists.

The teams are led by academic researchers from a range of disciplines and stakeholder groups from industry and civil society to support convergent and collaborative problem-solving.

Competing teams come from University College Dublin, Dublin City University, NUI Galway, University College Cork, and Tyndall National Institute, with the involvement of a number of national agencies, hospitals and world leading SFI Research Centres.

Congratulating the shortlisted teams, Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Heather Humphreys TD, said: "On behalf of the Government, I want to congratulate the six teams who have made it to the second round of the Future Innovator Prize competition. We launched the initiative last year to encourage bright minds across the country to work together to identify major challenges facing Ireland's society, and to propose creative solutions. It is very exciting to see so many innovative ideas coming through and I look forward to seeing their ideas develop further over the coming months."


Minister of State for Training, Skills, Innovation, Research and Development, John Halligan TD, said: "It is heartening to see the excellent standard of the six teams who have progressed to the second round of the SFI Future Innovator Prize competition. Their passion for their fields reflects their dedication to improving Ireland's economy and society through research, collaboration and inventiveness. I am confident that they will continue to impress us as the competition goes on."



(JG/CM)