“Defence Innovation Challenge”, the 1st Innovation Competition of the Hellenic Ministry of Defence, is completed

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The crowdpolicy collection EN

6 min readSep 26, 2022

Τhe online Conference of Defence Innovation Challenge, the 1st Innovation Competition in the defence sector, was held with great success on Monday, May 23, 2022. Its main objective was to mobilize the productive forces of our country, mainly new technologies and innovative proposals on the theme “Situational Awareness Innovation”.

The innovation conference was attended by startups, developers, researchers, students, professionals, business executives, executives of the Ministry of National Defence, executives of GDDIA and the wider public sector, and in general, anyone interested in global trends, digital transformation and innovation in the defence sector.

At the beginning of the Innovation Conference, Mr. Aristides Alexopoulos, General Director of GDDIA, gave a short speech: “This competition gave a lot of people the opportunity to approach the defence and security sectors through the lens of research and innovation. The participants were asked to provide solutions to one of the greatest contemporary technological challenges, that of situational awareness, and they achieved it by harnessing their ingenuity and imagination. At the same time, the competition resulted in a new step towards the communication and cooperation between the Ministry and the research, technological and industrial community of the country, in order to achieve greater interconnection and feedback.”

In addition, a short greeting was addressed by Dr. Georgios Kaimakamis, Dean of the Hellenic Army Academy, who talked about the importance of innovation and new technologies in the defence industry, as well as the appropriate ways of utilising them to give our country a comparative competitive advantage.

Then there was a short presentation of the 11 proposals resulting from the final evaluation of the submitted proposals, and in the end, a constructive discussion took place and relevant questions submitted during the event by the participants were answered.

Find out more about the 11 proposals: https://bit.ly/3PlLS29

Mr. Theodoros Kotzastavros, Open Innovation Lead of Crowdpolicy, was the coordinator of the Conference.

Following the conference, on Thursday, May 26, 2022, the Awards Ceremony of Defence Innovation Challenge took place and the 11 winning proposals, which stood out from a total of more than 200 proposals,were announced. They received cash prizes worth up to € 18,000 plus € 7,000 from the major sponsors of the event, Intracom Defence, as Gold Sponsor, and DEES Group, as Silver Sponsor.

The Deputy Minister of National Defence, Mr Nikolaos Chardalias, mentioned the following in his address: “It constitutes a particular honour and pleasure for me to attend today’s event, which is hosted for the first time by the Ministry of National Defence. We are here today to congratulate the hosts, the front runners and along with them all the participants in the first Defence Innovation Challenge, as well as those who contribute so that innovation and technology can become the tools to face the modern international challenges, thus making Greece a beacon of defence development. In this way, we materialise the Governmental policy for the establishment and consolidation of technological development, making our country a key pillar in the wider geopolitical region of the Southeastern Mediterranean, the Balkans and Europe.”

Mr. Nikolaos Chardalias, the Deputy Minister of National Defence

Then, the top four (4) teams, the three ones that received the highest evaluation score, as well as the team awarded the Young Innovation Award, made a short presentation of their proposals.

DC-166 — Roob — Eleftherios Miriounis — Young Innovation Award

At the end of the event, the awards were presented to the 11 teams that were distinguished.

The Coordinator of the Award Ceremony was Colonel Nikolaos Megos, Director of Defence Investments & Technological Research.

The following teams were distinguished:

1st Place — a cash prize of € 7,000 awarded by the Deputy Minister of National Defence to the DC-138 team — Ihotropio for the “Tactical Individual Aid for Processing Environmental Sounds and Protecting the Fighter’s Hearing.”

2nd Place — a cash prize of € 5,000 awarded by the Deputy Minister of National Defence to the team DC-194 — Purple Rain for “A Scalable, Wide Area Surveillance Technology for Real-Time Situational Awareness”

3rd place — Youth Innovation Award — a cash prize of € 3,500 awarded by the Deputy Minister of National Defence to the DC-200 team for “Autonomous perception towers for detection, identification and tracking of objects or events of interest”.

4th Place — a cash prize of € 2,500 awarded by the Deputy Minister of National Defence to the DC-166 team for “Using RFID technology to record and manage military equipment”.

5th Place — a cash prize of € 1,000 awarded by the Deputy Minister of National Defence to the DC-054 team for “Portable Distributed Network of Passive Radio Detection and Countermeasures Systems for Small and Medium Sized UAS”.

6th Place — a cash prize of € 1,000 awarded by DEES GROUP (APOSTOLOS KONSTANTINOS) to the DC-171 team for “Enemy UAV threat surveillance and protection system using low-cost multifunctional UAVs”.

7th Place — a cash prize of € 1,000 awarded by IDE (Stergios Topis, General Manager, Products & Solutions) to the DC-176 team for the DefenceAI concept

8th Place — a cash prize of € 1,000 awarded by DEES GROUP (APOSTOLOS KONSTANTINOS) to the DC-122 team for “Submarine Identification with Artificial Intelligence, SIwAI”.

9th Place — a cash prize of € 1,000 awarded by IDE (Efstathios Karagiannis, General Manager, Defence Programs) to the DC-109 team for “Enhanced Situational Awareness (eSA) using GIS and Bayesian Networks. An operational decision support model.”

10th Place — a cash prize of € 1,000 awarded by DEES GROUP (APOSTOLOS KONSTANTINOS) to the DC-158 group for “Silent and invisible flare.”

11th Place — a cash prize of € 1,000 awarded by IDE (Georgios Kiamos, General Manager, Operations) to the DC-110 team for “Development of a cellular bioelectric biosensor for the rapid and on-site detection of bioterrorism threats: The example of anthrax bacillus.”