Background and History

In the academic year 2002/2003 Excitera Innovation challenge (EIC) was started at KTH, inspired by on the MIT competition "$50K". The competition format - writing an innovation plan - with continuous events for inspiration and training became trend-setting for all Excitera activities. More than 30 teams participated the first year and the various events were attended by a total of 1500 people. Two of the projects within EIC grow so much that they were turned into separate competitions; Swedish Game Awards (SGA) and Excitera Mobile Award (later renamed Charon)

To develop a unique concept that would differ Excitera Innovation Challenge from other business plan competitions, a new strategy was formed during the semester 2003/2004. Instead of having the participants writing innovation plans based on their own business ideas, Excitera would now invite researchers to present one or more exciting new research results, from which the students was encouraged to come up with concepts for new applications and write an innovation plan. This development in strategy gave more room for the other Excitera competitions and strengthened the research profile of Excitera Innovation Challenge. EIC is to this date the project within Excitera that best fulfills the goals and visions of the Excitera association.