INDIMA 
The project „INDIMA“ by Emin Vojnikovic und Georg Simonyan, whose team was formed at this year's initiative "Update Social", a project of the Johannes Kepler University (JKU) and Volkshilfe, under the patronage of the province of Upper Austria, was able to impress the jury with a convincing pitch and their idea.
The idea is to support qualified migrants in their search for further education opportunities and jobs through automated classification recommendations of qualifications. This should improve the recognition process and facilitate the path to the labour market in Austria.

hands-on Austria 
The initiative „hands-on Austria“, submitted by Alyssa Kamoun, aims to develop a platform that collects creative and craft workshop-formats as well as events in Linz and makes them clearly searchable and findable. This creative business idea has already won over other supporters, so the three-person team of graphic designers and full-stack developers will get to work on the realisation of the design, which stands out due to its simple operation and appealing interface.

GUTTUN 
„GUTTUN“, a project submitted by Stefanie Stadler and Jeremias Blaickner, offers a preventive, need-oriented mental health support service. Through early recognition, support as well as integration into everyday life, they pursue a holistic and sustainable approach to supporting mental health. A pilot project with participants has already proven the value of the programme, which now wants to build more momentum, supported by a grant.

Paper Games 
Michael Zelenka's idea of „Paper Games“ convinced the jury with his passion to offer affordable, customisable and entertaining print & play games for all age groups and to become one of the first providers in the German-speaking region. His idea, which serves factors such as sustainability, creativity and entertainment, wants to expand the range of entertainment games beyond Austria's borders in the future and offer new and exciting content at regular intervals using AI-generated content.

In addition, this year an additional benefit was awarded to the project „Cultural Heritage Archive“, submitted by Jean-Claude Grieco and Florian Böttcher, which deals with the digitalisation and archiving of cultural heritage. Through a cooperation with the FH Upper Austria, one of the limited tickets for the Start-Up and Enterpreneurship Intensive Course "Wanna be a founder" - worth 1.350 euros - could be made available.

The Jury:

Ashna Mudaffer, MSc. - Business Upper Austria

Claudia Falkinger - Co-Founder & CFO/CSO - Punkt vor Strich GmbH

Mag.^a Eveline Pupeter - CEO and owner emporia Telecom GmbH & Co KG

Bernhard Lehner - Factory 300

Clemens Zillner, MA. - Start-up Consultancy tech2b

Elisabeth Berger - JKU - Institute for Enterpreneurship 

Dr. Gerhard Roiss - Ex-CEO OMV