First place in Fujifilm Future Challenge

Tilburg University student team won the first place in Fujifilm Future Challenge. One the students was on exchange semester in Tilburg from the Faculty of Economic Sciences Master program Strategic Corporate Finance.

Albert Arutiunian, second year HSE master student chose Tilburg University to study abroad in the fall 2016. There he became a member of the Tilburg University team and here is his story:  Fujifilm has Open Innovation Hub in Tilburg, the Netherlands, that was open many years ago. Fujifilm Future Challenge 2016 was initiated by Open Innovation Hub. The purpose of competition was to develop disruptive product based on the core technologies of the firm. Task was pretty broad, completely different from what you get in case competitions in Moscow. In the latter case you have specific problem that you can strip to components, delegate and solve. In order to fill a gap in technical knowledge company gave us an opportunity to communicate with their representatives on a regular basis.

There were teams from Tilburg University, Eindhoven University of Technology and Avans University of Applied Sciences. Our team was composed by dr. James Small after CV screening and brief interviews. I got into a team with students of master programmes in Strategic Management, Marketing Analytics and Information Management. We got really diverse team in terms of expertise and culture (my teammates were from the Netherlands, Greece and China), so we got to know a lot about each other and foreign cultures.

From September till December we have met for several times per week and up to mid-November we have developed nothing new. We discussed dozens of industries, proposed over 50 possible products, but almost all of them were rejected by Fujifilm managers. Lots of ideas were already in the market, not innovative enough or too complicated/expensive to produce. When we ran out of ideas, we decided to send our last idea that actually was a sort of joke - to develop a tattoo printer (printing equipment represents significant part of company`s business).

Surprisingly, company liked this idea, however it turned out to be too expensive and complicated to produce as well. We started to research tattoo market in general and found out a problem with a skin reactions on contaminants in tattoo inks. At the end of the day, we proposed Fujifilm to develop and sell high-purity tattoo inks with enhanced removability features.

In the mid-December we presented this idea to the jury (representatives of different industries) and won the competition. In our pitch I tried to apply all the knowledge presented in Venture Capital class by Ivan I. Rodionov. We have shown the problem that product will solve, its size and potential market, explained the solution in a simple manner and presented key project financial.

Soon we have to present the idea to the company management in Barcelona and if they like they idea we can work for a year and put it into action.