This year’s Youth Innovation Festival provided a vital platform to celebrate and disseminate the work going on across regional universities to create an environment that encourages young and innovative entrepreneurship. 2015 InnoFest finished on a high with the awarding ceremony to grant funding to 35 student projects.

InnoFest, organized and hosted by Lobachevsky University, attracted over a thousand of students from a douzen or so universities and research centres. Young innovators presented about 300 projects to the jury.

Grant funding was given to the 16 winners of UMNIK Innovation Project Competition for government financing, the 16 winners of the Youth Research Innovation Competition and Exposition (projects in the fields of IT, medicine, nanotechnology, new materials, hardware systems, and social innovation), and the 3 winners of Innograd 4.1:i-Generation 4.0 business game (projects in categories: innovative business, family business project and social innovation).

“Participation in such events is viewed as an opportunity to meet a lot of people with an interest in innovation and business, to be inspired with new ideas, to listen to criticism, to show ourselves and propose our project,” Nikita Emelianov, TrackThings project author, said.

“UMNIK Innovation Project Competition plays an important role for young developers. It can either support existing projects or give impetus to the creation of new developments. For me, this programme provides an opportunity to focus on a promising and interesting study”, PhD student Artem Rykov said.

“Innograd is more than just a game. The authors of the project provide training in the form of a game with a competitive element and combine the game with an opportunity to gain experience from experts and professionals – curators and lecturers. The prize for the winners might be the first mini-investment in the development of the project,” Alexey Solokhin, one of the developers of [Re]Quest, said.

Now in its second year, the Festival featured the Young Innovator of the Year competition and Science Stand-up for young researchers with a passion for their own scientific work. Participants gave presentations in front of a live audience to see if they can really attract interest, proving that creativity is at the heart of innovation.