Innovation Contest by the City of Munich

We won!

We are happy to announce that we received the Munich Innovation Award for the category of “Emission-free Mobility in Munich” from the City of Munich. The final event was held on July 22nd, presented by the 2nd Mayor of Munich, Katrin Habenschaden. We’d like to share some details of the competition and what this means for the future of Plan4Better!

The Competition

The innovation competition called on the startup community to present sustainable solutions to municipal issues. We proceeded to compile an application in the Spring of 2021 and then received news that we were finalists and would be allowed to present our ideas to the jury in the Summer.

In late July, we were then invited to present our pitch at the Munich Urban Colab building, a new office and events space for startups which is meant to bring together different startups in a co-working space. With the buildings recent opening, we had the honor and pleasure of taking part in one of the first in-person events at the Urban Colab.

The competition was almost a full day event, consisting of two rounds. Around noon, we pitched a 5-minute presentation of GOAT features, followed by 10 minutes of questions from the jury. Later in the evening, all the teams were invited to present their solutions in one-minute pitches, similar to a staged battle (for sustainability!).

We presented our solution for “Emission-free Mobility in Munich” however, there were other categories such as “Guest in Munich – simply sustainable!”, “Improving data on stationary and flowing traffic”, “Flexible Work @ LHM”, and “Pilot testing for the digitization of NO2 measurements”.

Each of the categories was first briefly presented by Katrin Habenschaden, followed by the final one-minute pitches from each team, and ending with the announcement of each challenge’s winner. Our session on emission-free mobility was hosted by Dr. Fabian Schütte, the Head of Research and Innovation Department for the City of Munich.

We ended the evening altogether with a get-together and some celebratory glasses of wine. As a tribute to the hard work put in by all the teams, we’d like to congratulate the winners and runner-ups.

What's next for Plan4Better?

We will have a one-year “implementation phase” in which we further develop GOAT and consolidate our development process with the City of Munich. This consolidation will take the form of joint workshops on the topic “How can we transform Munich into a 15-minute city?” with the use of GOAT. This kind of intensive exchange and valuable insight into the planning practices used by the city will eventually help us improve our indicators and analysis options within GOAT in order to adapt them to the needs of our users.

In addition, we won a “wild card” for an accelerator program of our choice - once we have just applied for the XPRENEURS Batch #10 of UnternehmerTUM anyway, this is very timely.

We will have more updates as the opportunities keep presenting themselves so if you are interested - follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter. For now, we are looking forward to the next steps and celebrating our first award certificate on our wall 😊.