Trinity College Dublin: Sustainable clothing platform wins Provost’s 2021 Innovation Challenge

An online platform to ease consumer access to sustainable clothing has emerged the winner of this year’s Provost’s Innovation Challenge at Tangent.

The winning LikeIt student team – Jonas Hellberg, Filippo Castelli, and Emilie Audran – faced stiff competition from ten teams of sustainability innovators over an intensive and challenging 3-day hackathon to finally win the Provost’s Challenge 2021, which comes with a €2,000 cash prize to take their idea further.

The runner-up team Ecode – Nathan Gaborieau, Elise Vens and Emmet Lowry – pitched their idea for a consumer app that enables clothing brands to communicate the sustainability of individual items to their customers.

The Provost’s Innovation Challenge at Tangent, now in its fourth year, is a social good hackathon that provides support, creative outlets, and mentorship for undergraduate and graduate students to have a real impact on a global problem. This year a total of ten teams took part from across the wider Trinity College community. This is a flagship event in Tangent’s student entrepreneurship calendar and is a cornerstone launchpad for the next generation of social entrepreneurs, along with LaunchBox, Trinity’s Student Accelerator, and the recently launched Open Incubator.

Last year, the Challenge topic was Sustainable Cities, with winning team ReFunk developing a platform and process to reduce the land waste and carbon footprint by easing the reuse and upcycling of furniture. ReFunk is now revenue-generating.

Jonas Hellberg of LikeIt said:

We are absolutely delighted and so grateful to Tangent to have had this opportunity to avail of the expert mentors and support throughout the hackathon to win the Provost’s Challenge. We can’t wait to develop our idea further.

Speaking at the event Ken Finnegan, CEO of Tangent, said.

The Provost’s Innovation Challenge is a fantastic opportunity for students from diverse disciplines to receive expert mentorship, to collaborate and to create solutions to real world challenges all in just 48 hours. We are consistently impressed by the fresh insights and dedication of our students in addressing today’s global problems with such enthusiasm, professionalism and optimism. All of us in the Tangent team look forward to seeing what becomes of all of the fantastic ideas that have emerged from this year’s challenge, and we will be delighted to continue to support through our range of programmes in Tangent.