BIT, the most important national innovation contest in Russia, will hold its finale this Friday on the premises of Moscow business incubator Digital October.
BIT — short for Business of Innovative Technologies — is an entrepreneurship competition organized each year to help innovative projects emerge from across the country. BIT selects “not only innovative ideas, but the business plans and the teams that can turn them into successful businesses.”
Inspired by the MIT $100K, BIT contests were organized for the first time in 2003 with Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (HSE), the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the Finance University under the Government of the Russian Federation. These institutes number among the country’s most prestigious business and technical universities.
Since its inception, BIT has grown into a nationwide competition. This year, in addition to teams from Moscow, it has attracted teams from eight Russian regions as well as teams from Belarus and Kazakhstan.
After initial selection at the regional level — the contest received 700 applications this year — the best projects are presented at a finale round of judging held in Moscow.
The BIT prize fund totals 5 million rubles, or almost $180,000, not counting a number of grants and various benefits from the sponsors of the contest, which include Intel, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Moscow Business School MBS and Finnish business accelerator FinNode.
The competition is also supported by the Russian Venture Company, a state owned fund of funds dedicated to financing innovation, and leading Russian mobile and telecom operator MTS, as well as a range of local players sponsoring the regional stages of the competition.
This year’s finalists include:
- Exoman, a project from St. Petersburg presented as “an entirely new class of powered exoskeletons” that enables a person to “work with heavy objects in situations where physical strength of the person is not enough, and the use of machines is impossible or impractical”;
- FilLis, a new generation of sorption filters for water purification, developed by a Siberian team;
- Knopka Zhizni (‘Life Button’), a medical alert system designed for the elderly and the disabled;
- Lesnoy dozor (‘Forest Watch’), an Internet and software platform presented by a Voronezh team designed to monitor forests using video surveillance, infrared and other detection systems;
- LinguaLeo, a Web service from Moscow’s Higher School of Economics that teaches foreign languages through popular TV serials, books and contextual dialogues;
- Maxygen, a project aimed at making DNA diagnoses possible in 10 minutes and accessible on a mass scale;
- Mobile Phone Locator, a system developed in St Petersburg to locate precisely and quickly the coordinates of mobile phones in cases of catastrophes, to help find all survivors and injured people;
- North Seeking Device, a patented device for ultra precise orientation in Northern areas;
- Outdoor Lasers, a system that can turn virtually any surface of up to 1,000 sq. meters into a high definition advertising surface;
- Russian3Dscanner, a project aimed at developing and promoting internationally 3D scanning software that can be supported with a wide range of cameras as well as LCD, DLP, and LED projectors;
- Scanoworld, a laser based 3D scanning device presented by an HSE team;
- Wishop, an advertising tool providing social network users with personalized ads in answer to their own requests;
- A line of radio bridges — communication systems in the mm-range — for transferring data at high rates without setting fiber optics, developed by DOK, a St. Petersburg company.
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