Image: Dublin Airport
Inspirefest attendees might find themselves winging their way to Hong Kong with an innovative idea for Dublin Airport’s Honest Eats initiative.
Every summer, Inspirefest, Europe’s leading sci-tech conference and festival, brings some of the brightest minds in science and technology to Dublin. On 21 and 22 June 2018, we will see some 3,000 leaders, entrepreneurs, technology professionals, researchers and academics gather for the fourth year at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre at the heart of Dublin’s Silicon Docks.
This year, our partners at The Future Factory at Dublin Airport are calling on Inspirefest 2018 attendees to apply to participate in an exciting mini hack at the main venue. The best concept presented on Friday 22 June will receive the amazing prize of flights for two to Hong Kong, courtesy of Cathay Pacific.
Engineers, developers, researchers, entrepreneurs and innovators attending Inspirefest 2018, here’s your opportunity to make an impact in food-tech and to have your ideas be part of a real-life project that will be subsequently piloted at Dublin Airport.
Join us to find innovative solutions for this exciting new honesty food initiative in a free-to-use, no-rights-granted but collaborative environment. Further details below. Pre-registration online required.
What is The Future Factory?
The Future Factory is a new innovation and business development hub at Dublin Airport. Driven by a team of dreamers and doers, they work hard to best prepare our national airport for the future. They experiment and test new products, services, solutions and initiatives with a core belief that the future is truly theirs to create.
What is The Future Factory doing at Inspirefest?
The Future Factory at Marqette (Dublin Airport’s award-winning food and beverage partner) and software partners CBE, have teamed up to launch an exciting new food offering called Honest Eats at Dublin Airport.
Honest Eats offers passengers a shopping experience free of check-outs. It allows passengers to pick, scan, pay and go via a cashless self-checkout software solution – all of which is without supervision from airport or retail staff, and relies on the honesty of passengers
CBE’s current software solution enables customers to simply scan their items and pay for them using their card or mobile payment application. The solution is widely used within the retail environment already and is familiar to the majority of passengers who travel through the airport.
Image: Dublin Airport
How can you get involved?
The airport project team (The Future Factory, Marqette and CBE) are looking to further develop The Honest Eats food and beverage experience at Dublin Airport and appeal even more to a passenger’s honesty.
They are looking for solutions that help them to build from their current MVP (minimum viable product) retail proposition into a cutting-edge travel experience. The short-term aim is to move this solution into areas of the airport where passengers need an excellent food and beverage option but where there is minimum space to allocate traditional solutions such as cafés, bars and food markets. The longer-term ambition includes potentially taking a fully developed proposition to other airports worldwide.
An of area for consideration is ensuring that the payment experience is as frictionless as possible while ensuring that the technology can be monitored on an ongoing basis and intervention can be easily provided should the customer require it, despite ‘the human’ being out of sight.
4 key trends to consider
The Future Factory is busy working on many new innovations that will build stand-out travel experiences. To do so it focuses on four main consumer and passenger trends it sees as important to the airport’s future:
- Seamless Connection: Putting passengers in cruise control over all of life’s multiple responsibilities resulting in seamless experiences and invisible transactions – just a simple, frictionless flow
- Effortless Convenience: Offering passengers immediate access to products and services and replacing friction with an experience of ultimate convenience
- Emotionally Relevant: Offering passengers products and services that speak to their ideas and beliefs – a down-to-earth approach that works to help passengers escape their over-programmed lives while offering them an enriched experience that fuels their desire to share their personal story
- Hyper-Personalisation: Putting passengers at the heart of everything we do, delivering personal experiences that are customised and contextualised, offering guaranteed satisfaction with moments of spontaneity
Potential solutions should be considerate of each of these growing trends, and should align to delivering on one or more of them to create maximum disruption.
Image: Dublin Airport
How to enter
- To enter the competition, entrants must submit a pitch with a maximum of 300 words via email to HonestEats@inspirefest.com
- Your entry must be given a name for clear identification
- Deadline for entry is midnight on Monday 18 June 2018*. Multiple entries are not permitted
- All entries will be reviewed against the set criteria and a shortlist will be announced on Tuesday 19 June 2018
- Shortlisted candidates will then be invited to do a three-minute pitch of their solution to a panel of judges at Inspirefest Stage 2 at 2.30pm on Thursday 21 June 2018
- Finalists will then get an opportunity to pitch again on Friday 22 June at 1pm, with the overall winner being announced from the Main Stage that afternoon
How will your solutions be evaluated?
Your solution will be evaluated on how it scores across:
- How it enhances the core Honest Eats proposition/objective
- How innovative the solution is, and how it delivers on the four key trends above
- The commercial impact of the solution (revenue enhancement or cost savings)
- How uniquely valuable the solution is to Dublin Airport and its food and beverage partner, Marqette (eg a branding tie-in or exclusivity of a proposed technology solution, etc)
- How you would partner with the airport project team on this journey to make your solution a reality
Provisional schedule (subject to change)
Thursday 21 June 2018
- Pre-lunch: Introduction and welcome by The Future Factory (Main Stage)
- 2.30pm: Top 10 shortlisted solutions given three minutes to pitch on Stage 2
- 3.20pm: Panel of judges pick and announce top three competing solutions
- 3.30pm: Final three competitors get an opportunity to meet and hack the expert minds of Dublin Airport, Marqette and CBE team in preparation for final pitching the next day
Friday 22 June 2018
- 1pm: Final pitches on Stage 2. Each team will be given a max of five minutes to do a final presentation to judges
- Late afternoon: Winners announced on Main Stage, presentation ceremony of prizes by Cathay Pacific and The Future Factory
The prize
The winner will get return flights for two to Hong Kong with the hack’s airline partner, Cathay Pacific.
This includes a cultural experience for two on arrival in Hong Kong. Entry and exit atDublin Airport through Platinum Services, VIP terminal.
The winner will also get the opportunity to partner with The Future Factory, Marquette and CBE to further develop the winning solution at Dublin Airport.
Image: Dublin Airport
Terms & Conditions
In applying to enter this competition you accept the following conditions:
- This competition is only open to Inspirefest ticket-holders aged 18 years or older. To enter, entrants must submit a pitch with a maximum of 300 words via email to HonestEats@inspirefest.com. Entry for the competition will close at midnight on the closing date, Friday 15 June 2018, following which no further applications to the competition will be accepted. Multiple entries are not permitted.
- It is the responsibility of the applicant to make themselves aware of the full requirements of this competition. The decision of DAA plc (“DAA”) in this competition is final and no right of appeal or objection to the outcome of the competition will be permitted.
- Any future commercial arrangement or partnering between any entrant to the competition and DAA and its partners shall be subject to agreement in advance on terms and conditions that are reasonably satisfactory to DAA.
- In entering this competition, you waive all rights in any intellectual property developed during the competition or subsequently in any collaboration that may take place between you and DAA and its partners in respect of the Honest Eats initiative or otherwise (the “Intellectual Property”). Furthermore, you shall not take any steps to protect the Intellectual Property, whether by filing a patent application or otherwise.
- By entering, all entrants release DAA and its partners from and against all claims and damages arising in connection with each entrant’s participation in this competition and/or their receipt or use of the prizes awarded in this competition.
Note: Dublin Airport and The Future Factory are business units within DAA plc (the legal entity that owns and operates Dublin Airport).
*Update, 4.11pm, 16 June 2018: The organisers have had many requests to give participants this weekend to allow them to get their thinking caps on, so they’re extending the deadline for applications to Monday 18 June. Last chance to get your application in!
Inspirefest is Silicon Republic’s international event connecting sci-tech professionals passionate about the future of STEM. Get your tickets now to join us in Dublin on 21 and 22 June 2018.
