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A team of six students from the Master’s programme Bio-Inspired Innovation is the only European team still in the running for the $100.000 Ray of Hope Prize®. After making it to the finals in July 2018, the students survived several consecutive rounds in which they were challenged to bring their innovation to market. In June, the team will travel to Minneapolis where the winner will be announced.

Climate change induced frost

The journey of team Habari began with their participation in the Biomimicry Global Design Challenge. In this contest, students from all over the world were challenged to create a nature-inspired innovation that addresses a problem arising from global climate change. Habari invented an automated system that provides a bio-inspired cover to protect crops from climate change induced frost. The cover was initially meant for Kenyan tea farmers, but for practical reasons the team decided to test their ideas with vineyard farmers in Germany who are facing similar problems.

Using local resources

The design turned out to be an outstanding idea and led the team right into the finals. Then came the challenge of bringing it to market. Habari once again came up with an ingenious plan: “We want our design to be more than just another product on the market, we want it to become available to every farmer and create it as sustainable as possible”, member of the team Janin Herkrath says. “How do we plan on doing this? In short, we want to create ownerless and self-learning technology and combine it with out physical solution.”

AI and blockchain

In order to achieve that goal, the team wants to build a digital system which estimates potential crop loss after frost events and sources information about the availability of local resources to build the optimal crop protection mechanism on site. Through thorough networking activities, the students gathered a team of multidisciplinary and enthusiastic experts to help them. On 12-14 April, they will all be attending the Odyssey Hackathon in Groningen, the world’s biggest Blockchain & AI hackathon, where they will build this new type of digital infrastructure. 

UPDATE: Habari won the Odyssey Hackathon. 

Call for students

Habari has gradually developed into a promising young start-up and currently lacks the manpower to act on all its ideas. The team therefore calls on Master’s students from a broad range of programmes to join them. “Students are allowed to claim their work with us as an elective course, so they even receive credits for it”, Janin adds. “We are looking for students from all kinds of backgrounds: from AI and blockchain to law and sustainable business management. So please contact us. After all, co-creation is what biomimicry is about.”