At the end of two days of presentations and pitches, last November 29 the winners of the 17th edition of the Italian National Award for Innovation (PNI), the largest and most widespread business plan competition in Italy, were named.
This year, the PNI Award - in which the best innovative business projects, winners of the 16 regional competitions (Start Cup) involving the 47 associated universities and incubators as well as numerous institutions, compete - saw the participation of more than 3,000 new entrepreneurs, for a total of almost 1,000 business ideas and more than 400 business plans presented. The winners were selected from the 69 finalist start-ups by a jury composed of representatives from the world of business, university research and venture capital, based on criteria such as the value of the technological or knowledge content, technical feasibility and development potential, adequacy of the team's skills, and market attractiveness.
The ICT Award (information technology and new media) went to Clearbox AI Solutions, overall winner of the Start Cup Piemonte Valle d'Aosta 2019 and start-up incubated in I3P: starting from the theme of trust, Clearbox AI Solutions makes it possible to adopt Artificial Intelligence by means of "eXplainable AI (XAI)" in the banking, insurance and healthcare sectors. The platform enables "human" explanations of decisions made by existing Machine Learning (ML) models with the goal of enabling users with limited experience to more easily interact with models that are becoming increasingly complex and opaque. "Clearbox's explanations," said CEO Shalini Kurapati, "help users of the system, such as operators, analysts and managers, discover and intervene in cases of bias, inaccuracy or inefficiency of ML models."
Clearbox AI Solutions also won the Boost Heroes Special Prize and will thus have an equity investment for a minimum countervalue of €10,000. PNI 2019 also saw the awarding of several Special Prizes to ReVideo, Start Cup Piemonte Valle d'Aosta finalist, in particular:
- the AIIC "Health Care Innovation" Award, made available by the Italian Association of Clinical Engineers and aimed at the development of solutions for technological innovation in the delivery of healthcare services;
- the M-Accelerator LA Special Prize, which consists of an Early Stage acceleration path in California worth $24,000.
Revideo proposes a multimedia rehabilitation and regenerative therapy for the recovery of vision in patients suffering from optic nerve diseases (such as glaucoma) and maculopathies, which can be performed directly at home to the benefit of a higher quality of life for the patient and a significant reduction in health care costs.
The total prize money for PNI 2019 is almost 1.5 million euros: about 500,000 euros in cash and 1 million euros in services, offered by the universities and incubators that are members of the PNICube association and by the vast ecosystem of support for entrepreneurial innovation that PNICube has been able to build over the years.
