NTU undergraduate team wins first prize in a global Shell innovation competition
Three students from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have won a global Royal Dutch Shell innovation competition. Their prize – an all-expense paid trip to the Antarctica.
Royal Dutch Shell, commonly known as Shell, is a multinational oil and gas company headquartered in the Netherlands. It is the fourth largest company in the world as of 2014, in terms of revenue.
Shell head office in the Netherlands (credit: Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licence)
A mobile app designed by Team Renaissance, a trio made up of Alex Chen, May Lim and Nitya Anthony, was picked as the winner of Shell Ideas360, a global innovation challenge that received more than 1,000 ideas from 55 countries.
The students’ app, Food Basket, aims to reduce 1.3 billion tonnes of food wasted worldwide each year, which costs the average household S$2,000 annually. It allows consumers to track their groceries, including the expiry dates, and will suggest recipes for items before they expire. Users can also trade food items through the app’s market place. This reduces over-buying of groceries and in turn reduces food wastage.
The NTU team's mobile app helps consumers to track their groceries, including the expiry dates (credit: Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licence)
Chen, Lim and Anthony are all from NTU’s top engineering programme, the Renaissance Engineering Programme. The team came together from different engineering disciplines within the programme to tackle food wastage on a global scale.
The competition, Shell Ideas360 calls on young people to submit inventive solutions to the planet’s energy, water and food issues.
Now into its second year, the competition’s 2015 grand final was held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The five finalists had to present their ideas to a panel of experts from the business sector, academic institutions and non-governmental organizations. Other than Team Renaissance, the other four teams were from universities in the UK, Malaysia, Qatar and USA.
The team may get to see penguins up-close as they won an all-expense paid trip to Antartica (credit: Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licence)
Featured image of NTU's North Academic Complex (credit: Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons licence)
