Françoise von Trapp
3D InCites first covered the IPSO Challenge in Dec. 2015 with a preview of the event, hosted by the IPSO Alliance. She interviewed Jens Eliasson, of IPSO member Luleå University of Technology, about his Smart Rock Bolt technology which won the 2015 Challenge. Françoise recently reached out to Jens for an update and has published her article on 3D InCItes.
From the article:
Six months ago, I interviewed Jens Eliasson, associate professor at Luleå University of Technology (LTU), and co-developer of the Smart Rock Bolt, a vibration-sensor-based device used for instrumenting tunnels in mines to detect potential catastrophic collapses. He had just accepted the IPSO Challenge grand prize on behalf of his team.That story is here. I caught up with him after IoT World for an update. It turns out that winning the IPSO Challenge was quite a game changer for him. In his words, it “opened the floodgates” of opportunity.
Eliasson says all the publicity on the IPSO Alliance website, 3D InCites and others resulted in a number of inquiries from Swedish mining companies. It also led to entering a second contest run by the Swedish mining industry to support smaller companies and their ideas, and ultimately fund product development. He won that as well, and added €40K to the coffers to fund his company, ThingWave and started to actually manufacture Rock Bolt sensors and focus on real mining installations for a Swedish company, Boliden.