The 5th Ford YouXing Innovation Challenge Has Been Launched
On March 7, 2022, initiated by Ford Motors, the 5th Ford YouXing Innovation Challenge officially started recruiting students from universities across the country. The new event in 2022 will feature Intelligent Cockpit as the new theme, and it will restart the offline Ford YouXing Innovation Training Camp to help and incubate participants to explore emotional communication design solutions in Intelligent Cockpit.
Intelligent Cockpit represents the direction of future automobiles. Mr. Anning Chen, President and CEO of Ford China, stated that “We hope to inspire, discover, and cultivate the innovative spirit of the younger generation through the guidance of this new track. We will integrate more digital technology perfectly into Intelligent Cockpit, allowing emotional communication between people and automobiles, and cultivating more young talents to achieve a warm human-machine interaction experience.”
At the same time, the Ford YouXing Innovation Training Camp, which was interrupted for two years due to the epidemic, is also planned to be restarted this year. The project teams of the eight finalists selected for the 2022 Ford YouXing Innovation Challenge will have the opportunity to participate. The Ford YouXing Innovation Training Camp this year will introduce training sections based on Lean Entrepreneurship, such as innovative project design, business logic polishing, business simulation, and Ford’s professional engineering skills impartation, to systematically improve the participants’ business thinking, project design, pitch, and technical level.
The 2022 Ford YouXing Innovation Challenge has made adjustments to the award setting and prize money. New annual theme awards, best creative awards, best communication awards, and outstanding individual awards have been added. Ford Motors hopes to support innovative young people and help sustainable development of transportation projects.
The previous four Ford YouXing Innovation Challenges attracted more than 2,800 youths from 161 universities in nine countries worldwide to participate in 463 projects. A total of 157 Ford engineers were gathered to provide participants with more than 1,500 hours of empowered training.
In the previous four competitions, many outstanding projects and teams emerged. The winner of the first Ford YouXing Innovation Challenge, the project team led by Hao Pu, a postgraduate student from Nanjing Tech University, has received Pre-A round investment of millions of yuan for its award-winning project, and Hao Pu was selected for the 2019 Forbes China 30 Under 30 Elite List in the industrial manufacturing industry.
The second place winner of the second competition, a project team from Anhui University of Technology, won the annual second place award with their project “Machine Vision Enables Multiple Eyes for Transportation-Shallow Water Warning.” In 2021, the team completed the reply of the software copyright patent and successfully applied for two international patents.The champion of the fourth competition is the Assembly-Type Wireless Charging Intelligent Road Surface project from Nanjing University of Technology. By combining magnetic coupling wireless transmission technology with assembly-type road surfaces, the brainstorm of electric vehicles charging while driving has become a reality.
According to Ford’s claim, in the future, Ford will uphold the vision of building a better world and helping people achieve their dreams of free travel. It will continue to inspire young people’s innovative actions, build a youth innovation incubation platform, and cultivate more talents for the development of the industry.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.