The Technische Universität München (TUM) and its affiliated institute UnternehmerTUM have been honoring the university's best startup ideas with the TUM IdeAward since 2012. TUM and UnternehmerTUM present the prize together with the Zeidler Research Foundation, which provides the prize money totaling €37,500. This year, a total of ten teams were able to present their startup ideas, three of which ultimately received the coveted award.
TUM IdeAward 2020: The three winning teams
1st place: Stella Medical
Stella Medical has developed a surgical navigation system for spinal stabilization surgeries. Using computer vision technology, the system enables the precise placement of pedicle screws in vertebral bodies and offers a user-friendly, portable, and cost-effective alternative to previous solutions.
2nd place: GST – Global Sustainable Transformation
Palm oil is the most widely consumed vegetable oil worldwide. Large-scale cultivation of oil palms is often associated with significant ecological, social, and human rights problems. An alternative to palm oil with identical properties is yeast oil. GST – Global Sustainable Transformation is developing a technology platform for the sustainable production of yeast oils, designed to enable industrial scalability with high productivity and low costs. Neither genetically modified organisms nor toxic solvents are used. Due to its high oxidative stability, the oil can be used directly without refining.
3rd place: Siderion
Solid-liquid reactions play a key role in all process industries, particularly in the pharmaceutical sector and water treatment. Established processes for these processes have weaknesses that result in increased time, space, and resource requirements. Siderion aims to solve these problems with a highly efficient rotating bed reactor whose periodic centrifugal forces keep the particles in an oscillating motion. The reactor chamber rotates around its own axis and also moves in a circular path.
