Students from the digital business major are triumphant at the morpheus cup

Stéphane Vukovic, Hélène Gautier and Olivier Fournier bring home the European inter-collegiate Morpheus Cup in Luxembourg

Photo Credit : Essencia Models

Every year, the Morpheus Cup competition invites universities and Grandes Ecoles from over 30 European countries to go head to head in challenges with a digital focus. It takes place as part of the ICT Spring, one of the largest European exhibitions dedicated to web professionals, which brings together some 6000 entrepreneurs, startups and investors.
The team representing HEC Paris in this year’s edition distinguished itself from 50 other institutions selected for the final. This victory is testament to the team’s solid performance during a day interspersed by multiple challenges (marketing, Fintech, creativity, …) and pitches before juries consisting of digital experts, fund managers and venture-capital managers.
The team were actually rewarded 3 times, since they won the “Grand prize” acknowledging their overall performance in all of the challenges, the “Jury’s exceptional prize” for the best project pitch as well as the “Best performers prize” in the Fintech Category.
Stéphane Vukovic reflects on the competition highlights and explains “Homelife” to us – a project developed in the online health sector, conceived following the Connected Objects Challenge (IoT) organized by the Digital Business major last January.  

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“To participate in this competition, we first had to submit a presentation describing the ‘Homelife’ project, the business model and our objectives. Consequently, we had to present innovative ideas on different themes (InsurTech, Culture, Gaming and Procurement).”

Challenges and pitches

“The competition unfolded in 3 parts:

• The morning was devoted to several challenges during which we had to answer general culture questions about themes such as digital, technology, science-fiction etc.…
• The afternoon was dedicated to themed challenges: we presented innovative solutions in the Marketing and Fintech sectors.
• Last of all, the end of the day was reserved for the pitches. We therefore presented the homelife project in 5 minutes before a jury led by Dr. Philippe Pouletty, the co-founder of Truffle Capital, and composed of professionals in health, sport and the world of business (Jelena Djokovic, National Director of the Novak Djokovic Foundation, Jean-Jacques Dordain, former Managing Director of the European Space Agency, researcher Vaclav Smil, among others)”

“Homelife”: the connected object dedicated to pulmonary transplants

“Homelife” offers a solution for medical follow-ups at home for patients that have gone through a lung transplant. The team prototyped a connected object designed to assess various daily effects (temperature, heart rate, exhalation volumes…) from which the results are transferred directly to medical staff who receive an alert immediately in cases of abnormality. 

In this way, we thought that we could significantly reduce the number of rejections and post-surgery infections by allowing doctors to be contacted more quickly and improve their diagnosis. This project was first offered to us by Hospitals in Paris (APHP) and we have decided to go further than our Major’s IoT challenge, going as far as to create a functional prototype in collaboration with designers and developers.

Our goal is to expand into other types of respiratory illnesses such as asthma or cystic fibrosis and develop a solution to make life easier for patients with respiratory problems after they leave the hospital.  

The digital business major: an innovative education oriented towards action

“The education we receive through the Digital Business Major has been particularly useful in the challenges and pitches. Beyond theoretical classes, under the learning by doing approach of the major, we have actually been encouraged to offer innovative solutions in challenges organized by the major (for companies like Axa, Leroy Merlin or Coca-Cola, for example). We have also received an education that puts an emphasis on the art and style of pitching which enabled us to feel at ease while speaking. Through classes and these practical experiences, our education has also sensitized us to several digital-linked themes such as Big Data, IoT (the Internet of Things) and social entrepreneurship. Thus, we were able to exploit this knowledge during the competition. We feel particularly thankful for the Digital Major supervisors, to whom we owe much for these awards.”

Read more about the program

Digital Specialization