A huge round of applause goes to our fabulous team that won the audience award at the Makeathon in Paderborn on Friday evening! Together with the team from GEA Group, our NEXT colleagues worked on the challenge set by UNITY and G. Kraft Maschinenbau GmbH on the topic of „AI-optimised production planning“ – and finally came out on top after 72 hours of hard work! 🎉 You can watch the whole pitch of our team in this video from minute 18:10: A total of 120 participants took part in the Makeathon and developed concrete ideas for 19 challenges of 20 companies. In addition to our separate challenge for the audience award, there were also two winners for the data and ideation challenges: With their idea for intelligent energy management, the team from Bielefeld University solved the Data Challenge of Weidmüller Deutschland and Hesse GmbH and won the prize money of 10,000 euros. 5,000 euros for winning the Ideation Challenge went to the team in collaboration with Herbert Kannegiesser GmbH, which developed a concept to make industrial laundries more efficient and to operate them more efficiently. The ideas were selected by the jury consisting of Dr Stefan Breit (Miele), Oliver Flaskämper (Priority AG), Frank Maier (Lenze), Almut Rademacher (owl maschinenbau e.V.) and Andreas Trotz (Sparkasse Paderborn-Detmold). We are pleased to have been able to take part in this great event! Many thanks to the organisers and all participants – and of course to our colleagues Stephan Sommer-Schulz, Dr Masud Fazal-Baqaie, Neele Kuhnke, Lars-Holger Wilke and Marc-Andre Scheu 🙌🏼