Beer made from leftover bread and an augmented reality app for online learning are winning ideas in innovation competition
- HKUST students’ idea to turn unsold bread into beer to prevent food waste was victorious in Hong Kong’s inaugural City I&T Grand Challenge
- The creator of an AR-based app that adds digital content to books was also a winner in the competition, which sought ideas to solve everyday issues
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Every day, Hong Kong disposes of up to 3,500 tonnes of food waste, according to the Environment Bureau. That’s equivalent to the combined weight of around 500 male African elephants.
Four students at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) got a first-hand look at such waste as bakeries near their campus threw away unsold goods such as bread, cakes and sandwiches at the end of each day.
“We realised food waste is a problem we would love to solve, but at first we had no idea how,” says HKUST engineering major Anushka Purohit. However, a night out in Lan Kwai Fong to celebrate the end of final-year examinations gave Purohit and her friends the idea to turn bread waste into beer.
“Beer has three main ingredients: barley, malt and hops, and barley makes up around 80 per cent of every brew,” Purohit, the team's CEO, explains. “We realised that bread and beer are made of the same constituent element.”
That realisation led to the creation of Breer. The team collects unsold bread from bakeries before it goes to waste, and uses it to replace barley powder in the brewing process.
Breer ended up winning the university/tertiary institute category for environmental sustainability in the first City I&T Grand Challenge. This new competition encourages people from all walks of life to come up with innovative ideas to solve challenges that affect the everyday lives of people in Hong Kong.
Under the theme of “Innovating for Hong Kong’s New Normal”, participants in four categories – the primary school group, secondary school group, university/tertiary institute group and the open group – focused on developing solutions that are driven by innovation and technology (I&T) and address one of two themes: environmental sustainability and social connectivity.
Tackling everyday problems
More than 740 entries were submitted by budding innovators ranging from primary school students to entrepreneurs with established start-ups, with the finalists pitching their ideas to a panel of judges during the finale held on October 16.
Dr Sunny Chai, chairman of HKSTP and a judge for the competition, says: “The City I&T Grand Challenge is the first of its kind, and a great platform for innovation and technology people to demonstrate their ideas.”
Purohit says she and her team learned a lot from taking part in the competition, particularly about pitching an idea. Despite practising their presentation, they ran out of time during their final four-minute pitch.
“We were really worried, but the judges could still see the value of our idea,” Purohit says, adding that it felt “amazing” when the Breer team was announced as a winner.
But the journey to becoming a champion innovator was not without hurdles. The biggest challenge that Purohit and her team faced in trying to turn their idea into reality was finding a bakery willing to donate its unsold bread. Purohit overcame this issue by personally visiting multiple bakeries to explain her team’s intention.
Having won the competition, Purohit has ambitious plans for the future of Breer, including introducing a second beer product and building up the brand with assistance from HKSTP.
Breer is already part of HKSTP’s Ideation programme, which provides one year of support to help start-ups get off the ground. But as a winner in the City I&T Grand Challenge, the team will also receive six to nine months of training from the organiser to help refine its product, according to Chai.
Online learning made more engaging
The offer of support to validate and promote a product born from a creative idea was what attracted Leo Lau, founder and CEO of StoryTellAR, to the City I&T Grand Challenge. The concept for his entry came into being during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when Lau saw his son struggling with online learning and became inspired to find a way to bring physical books to life.
That resulted in the development of an app-based learning tool. As its name suggests, the StoryTellAR app uses augmented reality (AR) technology to enable authors and teachers to create digital content – including videos, audio recordings, 3D animation and quizzes – for physical books. Readers access this content on the app by pointing their mobile devices at the page.
“When children have an exercise and they don’t know how to do it, they can scan the page and hear their teacher’s voice explaining the question,” says Lau, whose idea won the open group category for social connectivity.
One of the biggest challenges that Lau faced was creating AR content for a mobile platform. “Creating the whole experience for a phone meant we had to totally change the user interface and user experience,” he says. “It was even harder because during the pandemic, the team could not work together.”
Today, StoryTellAR is being used by more than 4,000 students in 10 schools across Hong Kong. Lau’s goal is to see the app adopted for widespread use, including outside of the city.
“We are also exploring another use case to make virtual art exhibitions more interactive and fun,” he says.
Like Purohit, Lau found taking part in the competition helpful in terms of honing his pitching skills. “Being involved in this type of competition gives you more exposure. It is a really important opportunity to have,” he says.
Purohit agrees. “The experience serves as a great opportunity to foster innovation and entrepreneurship,” she says.
Chai says competitions such as the City I&T Grand Challenge aim to “encourage ideas which will help to create a better world.” He adds: “Anyone in the city has the potential to be an innovator.”
