Above left to right: Yossi Shavit, Director of the Bengis Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation; Eyal Mayer, Head of Innovation at Mercedes Benz R&D Tel Aviv; Adi Ofek, CEO of Mercedes-Benz R&D Israel; Kim Twill (The winner); Michael Pavlovic, Head of Innovation at Mercedes-Benz Germany; and Dana Gavish Fridman, VP Entrepreneurship, BGN Technologies. (Photo Credit: Courtesy)
The Mercedes-Benz R&D Center in Israel hosted the final event of The Challenge last week, a competition for students from all academic disciplines in higher education institutions across Israel. The Mercedes-Benz Challenge sought new business ideas with big potential, specifically linked to the figure 100 million (which each team determined for itself). These could be clicks, new customers, sales, kilowatt-hours, autonomously driven passengers and more.
The Challenge is an open innovation platform created and launched by the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management's Bengis Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at BGU.
The six finalist teams presented their ideas to a Mercedes-Benz and BGU panel of judges. The members of the winning team, Kim Twill and Yoav Reisner, from the Department of Management in the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, will present their innovative approach to a Mercedes-Benz global innovation team in Stuttgart, Germany in the near future.
Eyal Mayer, Head of Innovation at Mercedes Benz R&D Tel Aviv: "Collaborations with enthusiastic students and creative start-ups are part of our company's strategy for creating an ecosystem of new and innovative concepts that could become part of future products and services."
Daimler AG's Mercedes-Benz runs 25 R&D centers across the globe, which work together synergistically to provide new products, services, technologies and ideas with the potential to change the future of the automotive industry and people's driving habits. The R&D Center recently opened in Israel is the newest addition to Daimler's worldwide R&D network, which has main centers in Germany, California, India and China that employ 16,000 people.
Prof. Oded Lowengart, Dean of the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, the Ernest Scheller, Jr. Chair in Innovative Management and Chairman of the GGFBM Bengis Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation emphasized the importance of promoting cooperation with leading entities in the eco-system of entrepreneurship and innovation. "The collaboration between academia and industry enables challenges for students while exposing them to real issues in the field. This adds practical value to the academic process while training students for the real world."
