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informatics students win water saver award

Congratulations go to postgraduate Informatics students Xiaoyang Yu, Danyi Feng, Lanxia Huang, and Chao Duan who have won the 'Water Saver Award' in the global round of the Innovation Tournament run by the Stanford  University as part of Global Enterprise Week.

Entrepreneurship is all about leveraging resources and creating value. This global competition challenged students to use an assigned, everyday object to create as much value as possible. Value can be measured on any scale e.g. monetary value, social impact, creative value, environmental value etc.

The mystery object, a plastic water bottle, was revealed to 292 awaiting teams from across the globe on Nov 13th, giving students 4 days to create as much value as possible from the object and to upload a 3 minute video to YouTube to record their activities for the judges.

Xiaoyang's team discovered that toilet flushes account for 26% of all indoor residential water use. They devised an innovative way of creating a half-flush function in an ordinary toilet, a cost-saving alternative to replacing the cystern with one with a dual-flush mechanism. This can save a bottle of water with every flush. 

View their winning entry

The team first won the University prize winning £100 from LAUNCH.ed, the student company formation support service that promoted the competition to University of Edinburgh students. They also won £250 from the Scottish Institute for Enterprise (SIE) winning the Regional Prize, competing with entries from Heriot Watt, Napier and St Andrews.

55 institutions took part from across the globe from 11 countries. All 292 entries went into the global round for a chance to win one of 23 awards in different categories. Judges included Stanford University representatives, entrepreneurs, and senior executives from firms such as Deloitte, Logitech and CBS Interactive. The are no prizes for the Global Round but the winning teams receive substantial recognition from all participants, Institutions, judges and Stanford University. 

View all winning entries from Global Round