During this year’s Hannover Messe one topic stood out extraordinary and far beyond the actual tradeshow booth. I am talking about the first occurrence of the IoT MindSphere Open Space Challenge for developers.

The Siemens MindSphere team partnered up with ten traditional Siemens partners and customers to find and indicate cases in their everyday businesses or to tackle complete new scenarios and ideas. These challenges and situations were formulated and publicly made available through our website to seek hungry innovators to apply for, work on the challenges and to come up with solution ideas.

Among the challenge initiators were leading names such as Festo, Baader, Rittal, FC Bayern Munich and even Expo2020. The challenges offered had a great variety and underlined the opportunity in the IoT and digitalization market. Baader, for instance, was looking for an e-communication solution between fish trawlers in their “IoT on Sea” challenge, while Expo 2020 was interested to find solutions for innovative crowd control management that help organize and enhance the experience of up to 150.000 expected daily visitors at the Expo in Dubai.

This co-creation approach brought together industrial clients and industry experience with partners and independent, external teams to resolve real needs and scenarios. As an example, on stage right in Hannover, two students from the University of Manchester presented a prototype that they built within just 24 hours showing their smart solution for the Festo case. They totally stole the show and won a deal with Festo to work on the challenge, while MindSphere will become the foundation of their implementation – triple win situation if you ask me.

In total, there were more than 400 registered teams and a dozen more followed the action through the live streams during the fair from all around the globe. After an extensive screening and preselection of all registrants and ideas, forty teams were selected and invited to Hannover to present their ideas, prototypes or solutions to an expert team and jury. The teams had a total of 15 minutes to present their ideas, while seven minutes was presentation time and eight minutes reserved for Q&A with the jury. The jury consisted of a representative of the challenge initiator, Siemens, and MindSphere representatives as well as jury expert Daniel Cronin, entrepreneur, lecturer, presenter and experienced keynote speaker.

After deserved celebrations, the winners will now head into direct conversations and meetings with the customer to further work on implementing their ideas. If you missed the pitches or just want to go back and watch some of the presentations again, you can find all of the recordings on our video archive here on YouTube, or just jump right into our Dieffenbacher pitch here.

Learn more about Siemens MindSphere on MindSphere.io – the website and community for developers and IoT enthusiast