Inter-school Hackathon: ESILV Students innovate for Spoon.ai, Cofidis, GANT and Spiribam

This year’s edition of the inter-schools hackathon brought together one hundred ten students from three schools – IESEG, ESILV and 42 – coached by experts from Onepoint, the leading player in the digital transformation of companies.

The event proposed students from different technical and creative disciplines to collaborate, learn, compete and show off their skills to solve business problems, while engaging with local companies: the start-up Spoon, the Cofidis group, the fashion brand GANT and SPIRIBAM, the iconic brand of Martinique’s AOC agricultural rums.

For four days, from 7 to 11 September, at Onepoint’s headquarters, the students participated in two 48-hour hackathons:

• On September 7th and 8th, the teams tackled the challenge of the Bank of the Future suggested by the Group Cofidis and tried to find concrete use cases for the Spoon robot.
• On September 10th and 11th, the students brought solutions to the problems related to notoriety, ecology and data for the Gant brand and the questions concerning the creation of value beyond the packaging, the enhancement of the visitor experience of the Habitation Clément touristic site thanks to the digital technologies for Rhum Clément.

Spoon, Cofidis, GANT, Spiribam: four companies, eight issues

Competitors had 48 hours to respond to one of the eight specific problems suggested by Spoon, Cofidis, GANT and Sipribam. To do so, coaches from Onepoint provided them with support in a setting that was both a source of ideas and a source of collective intelligence: Onepoint’s LivePoint, a space designed to encourage co-creation and new collaborations. The participants had the opportunity to prototype their solutions on the Oracle cloud.

Spoon.ai: developing emotional AI

For the first hackathon of the week, the students attempted to establish a marketing mix and an appropriate action plan to build awareness and boots the sales of Spoon.ai the 100% French robot sensitive to emotions.

Flora Maier, in her 4th year at ESILV, majoring in Data and Artificial Intelligence, tells us about her participation. “I wanted to use this opportunity to work with students from different backgrounds and to have some ideas for my project of the year.

Spoon is the face of an interactive character who appears on the screen, having a conversation with you and reacting to your movements. We wrapped up the event with our final pitch in front of company representatives and some members of the three schools. Our idea was to introduce Spoon in supermarkets to reduce time spent in stores and advise consumers”. (Flora Maier, class of 2022)

Cofidis: reinventing the bank of the future

The second challenge of the week: to brainstorm a solution for the challenge set out by the Cofidis group: “How can we facilitate the management of data and its use in daily life, by the customer, through open banking?”.

Clément Roux, in his 4th year, majoring in Financial Engineering, is part of the winning team for this challenge. “We have many applications that involve account set-up and payout (e.g. Netflix, Spotify…). However, the account creation process can sometimes be very tedious and slows down nearly 60% of the final registrations.

That’s why we decided to set up a “daily hub” which would be a banking application containing all our memberships. Then, to reconvert those 60 per cent of users who stop subscribing because the procedure is too long or requires the creation of an account, we thought of a fast registration button on applications such as Netflix. This new button would direct the user to the subscription option and would save him or her long minutes filling in the form, as the information provided is known to our bank. “

Gant: strategic marketing, environmental responsibility and supply chain optimisation

As part of this hackathon aimed at the fashion industry, the GANT brand proposed to students three problems to be solved over two days:

How to gain recognition and increase desirability among early adopters?
How to create value and desirability through ecological commitment?
How to automatise stock transfers and sales planning in the network of branches and affiliates?

The team of Jean Bec, in 4th year, majoring in Energy and Sustainable Cities, won the challenge “How to create value and desirability through ecological commitment”? ” After establishing a persona, we have carried out two complementary lines of development in parallel.

Firstly, we proposed a massive communication campaign with the slogan “GANT gets naked” with different “bold and brave” posters, each of which showing a particular setting where GANT is making a significant effort (the fields, the factory and the transport).

Also, on these posters, a QR code leads to a series of videos which show the behind-the-scenes of the making of GANT apparel, highlighting the brand’s respect for the environment from its beginnings to the present day. In these videos, only people involved in the manufacturing process take the floor.

Secondly, we proposed Gant to include a QR code on each label, which would lead to a page where the customer could see all the stages in the design of the product. For precision and safety, we used blockchain technology.” (Jean Bec, class of 2022)

The next step is to develop a PoC using IBM’s solutions and expertise.

Spiribam: digitalising the customer experience

For the last hackathon of the week, the students reflected on the issues proposed by Rhum Clément: ” How to stand out, create value and build loyalty beyond packaging” and “How to enhance the customer experience when visiting the Habitation Clément thanks to digital technology”.

Among the participants in these mixed teams was Eugen Flocea, a Romanian student on an academic exchange at ESILV, in the Computer Science, Connected Objects and Security major.

The teams presented their ideas to a jury of professionals from Sigfox, IBM, AXA, EdTech France, Crit Intérim. ESILV students will now continue their work by developing prototypes of their ideas, notably via IBM, Oracle and AWS cloud solutions, as part of industrial innovation projects.  The next meeting has been set for 8 April at the National Assembly, where the winning teams of this first stage will pitch their prototypes.