Spirit of Nobel fires up innovation exchange

Beijing team wins a grand-prize study trip to Sweden

Young entrepreneurs from China and Sweden had an opportunity to show their talent for technological innovation at the first Nobel Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition this month.

The competition, which ran from Dec 6 to 8, was intended to promote the international exchange of academic and technological innovation between Swedish and Chinese university students in the fields of new energy, new materials, artificial intelligence, big data and other areas of cutting-edge technology.

The winner of the grand prize went to a project team from Beijing Sunlectric Technological Company established by graduates from Tsinghua University.

The group was awarded a summer study trip to Sweden at the renowned Lund University, and an English-language course with Education First in Shanghai in 2018.

The project focused on producing an efficient and affordable solar photovoltaic power-generation terminal through the use of flexible crystalline silicon technology.

"We were motivated by the appreciation from the judges of the competition to keep up our endeavors on advocating the concept of low-carbon and environmental protection," says Liu Jie, one of the four copartners of the company.

Liu says the technology and strategies from other teams inspired her group to further improve their product's quality.

"More factories will be established to lower the production costs and to help promote the utilization of clean energy, like solar energy, in daily life," says Liu.

A team from Xi'an Jiaotong University won first prize for their design of a lower-limb rehabilitation robot based on a human-computer interface. The robot was created to help patients suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive nervous system disease, to maintain good communication with the outside world through an interactive system assisted with electroencephalography, or an electrophysiological monitoring method to record electrical activity of the brain.