Students and young entrepreneurs representing Europe’s top business schools participated in the Grand Finale of the third annual INNOVA Europe competition at ESMT.  

This year’s event brought together eleven leading business schools. This group of top academic institutions competed to tackle a unique challenge: developing innovative and sustainable projects that address the challenges of our time. The INNOVA Europe competition was founded in 2022 by EDHEC Business School, POLIMI Graduate School of Management, and ESMT to foster competition between business students and alumni, focusing on environmental transition, empowerment and inclusion, and healthy living.  

Hosted this year by ESMT, schools from across Europe networked and shared business plans, and pitched their start up ideas to experts.  

INNOVA Europe offered two start up categories in 2025: Young Hopes (ideation stage) and Rising Stars (start up stage). Start ups in the first category were judged on their clarity of vision, ability to solve specific sustainability challenges, and the singularity of their value proposition. Those in the second category were evaluated on progress, lessons learned, next steps, and team members’ ability to illustrate their product’s viability and market readiness. 

The day's grand prize winner in the Rising Stars category was AcouBatt from London Business School. The team led by Arthur Fordham and Chris Haoxin Xu walked away with €20,000 in prize money and a year of free incubation services at one of the eleven participating schools.  The startup develops acoustic sensor and machine learning technology to “listen” to batteries, optimizing the formation process, reducing scrap rates, and enabling more sustainable large-scale production. 

Another big winner, this time in the Young Hopes category, was Hovanka from Kyiv School of Economics. The team led by CEO Kris Nadiryan, who undertook a nearly 24-hour journey from Ukraine to Germany to participate, received €5,000 in prize money to help make their start up dream a reality. Hovanka is developing Mindset Architect, a personalized, adaptive mental health app that combines psychoeducation and practice to support users between therapy sessions, with the goal of preventing severe conditions and equipping young people with emotional literacy skills. 

INNOVA Europe is a leading European academic competition like no other. Its mission is to encourage young entrepreneurs to devise new ways to meet the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals, including providing clean and affordable energy, promoting responsible consumption, ensuring gender equality, reducing global poverty, and advancing a holistic approach to well-being and health.  

More information about the event is available here.