Students Bring Space Technology Down to Earth at the Swedish pavilion

SHANGHAI, Sept. 16 /PRNewswire-Asia/ --

Opening up innovation competitions for students to speed up the transfer of space technology to create sustainable solutions. At a workshop at the Swedish Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, twelve top students from Sweden and China will explore the new field of crowdsourcing ideas and innovation through competitions in an event organized jointly by the Down to Earth initiative and http://www.Studentcompetitions.com . 

The workshop aims to explore how open innovation competitions can be used systematically to speed up the technology transfer process between space technology and commercial sustainable solutions. Twelve students and young professionals from Sweden and China are invited to brainstorm on the theme of global open innovation competitions on September 18 at the Swedish Pavilion in the Shanghai Expo.

• Organizing global competitions is a very democratic way of solving problems: anyone with the best solution has the opportunity to participate and win, regardless of his or her background or nationality. It is an engaging and fun way to drive innovation and create tangible results more effectively, says Gustav Borgefalk, co-founder of Studentcompetitions.com.

The purpose of the workshop is to develop concepts for how the process of transferring space technology to create sustainable solutions could be facilitated by open innovation competitions. The event will be filmed and the presentations in the workshop will be published online and live streamed by Bambuser on the Swedish Pavilion's Website.

The result from the workshop will be incorporated in a long-term open innovation competition strategy which will be presented on the launch event of Down to Earth, "Space Day" taking place on October 10 in the Swedish Pavilion at the Expo.

This is not the first time the Swedish pavilion has hosted an event for young professionals. Previous activities include a design competition in collaboration with Tongji University of Art, a global photo competition together with world-famous photographer Mattias Klum, the 72-hour race to innovation and DreamHack.

• The young urban population is an important target group for the Swedish participation in Expo 2010. They are the ones who will come up with the solutions for the problems we face today and in the future, and through our activities here in the pavilion we want to encourage them and spark their creativity. We want to be a platform for innovation, says Annika Rembe, General Commissioner at the Swedish Expo Committee.

About Down to Earth

Down to Earth is a bold 10-year project ignited by the Swedish company Umbilical Design AB in partnership with Jonkoping International Business School, working in collaboration with diverse industrial partners with support from the European Space Agency (ESA) Technology Transfer Program.

About Studentcompetitions.com

Studentcompetitons.com provides the web's most comprehensive listing of competitions targeting students globally. The business branch of Studentcompetitions.com designs- and markets competitions and creates long-term competition strategies for companies, for recruitment, idea generation, innovation or branding purposes.