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Associated Alumni

UNB startup places third in global innovation competition

Eigen Innovations placed third at the Grand Innovation Challenge, a global competition for companies that are 'building innovated technologies on the Internet of Things'.

Launched in June and hosted by Cisco Systems Inc., the competition attracted over 3,000 entrepreneurs and startups from more than 100 countries. After a series of elimination rounds, the six finalists, or Super Six, were chosen in November. Eigen Innovations was the only Canadian company to reach the finals.

“The common denominator [among the finalists] is their interdependence on networked connections to the Internet,” says Alex Goryachev, Cisco’s director of innovation strategy and programs, in a blog post. “To me, as the organizer of this grand challenge, these innovators are incredibly inspiring in how they combine sheer creativity with the technical skills of our digital era.”

The Grand Innovation Challenge ended in December in Dubai at Cisco’s Internet of Things World Forum where the finalists pitched their innovations one last time.

"Our Intellexon® solution tells operators and engineers the where, when and how processes or product quality is starting to degrade within highly complex manufacturing systems," says Scott Everett (BScEng'09, MScEng'12, PhD candidate) co-founder and CEO at Eigen. “Our algorithms use massive amounts of data to learn how to differentiate between good and bad quality products; when conditions are starting to change, it can tell the reasons why."

For placing third in the competition, Eigen Innovations received $25,000.

The six finalists at the Grand Innovation Challenge were: CyberFlow Analytics (first place, USA), Green City Solutions (second place, Germany), Eigen Innovation (third place, Canada) CyberLighting (Finland); Inston Inc. (USA) and Simularity (USA).

Eigen Innovations is a Fredericton-based technology startup that provides software solutions for the industrial internet. It has a patented multi-dimensional, non-linear software algorithm that leverages big data information from industrial equipment and provides control input into the key devices that operate the manufacturing process.

It was co-founded in 2012 by UNB researcher Rickey Dubay, and alumni Richard Jones (BScFEng’84) and Scott Everett (BScEng’09, MScEng’12, PhD candidate).