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ZICHTBAAR
Residents know their neighbourhood better than the people who plan it. They see the dark underpass, the overflowing bins and the broken bench every day, but one email to the municipality reads as one person’s opinion. Complaints stay scattered, so planners cannot tell which problems affect many people and which affect a few. Without a shared, visible record of what residents want fixed, decisions about public space rest on guesses, and residents often see no result from reporting.
YUMIZ.
Young cosmopolitan snackers often face a trade-off when choosing snacks for busy everyday moments: convenient and tasty options tend to be less healthy, while healthier alternatives can be bland, expensive, or difficult to assess in terms of ingredients and nutritional value. Meanwhile, discovering authentic flavors from other food cultures is often associated with a more deliberate food experience rather than an accessible everyday snack.
TriCup
Billions of to-go coffees rely on separate plastic lids, used for minutes but persisting for centuries. Tightening single-use regulations push for change, yet reusable deposit systems struggle with low consumer adoption and high operational friction. The industry remains stuck between unsustainable habits and impractical alternatives.
The Easy Loop
Students often need a projector for one movie night, speakers for an event, or camping gear for a weekend. Buying these items can strain a limited budget and take up valuable space, while borrowing depends on knowing someone who owns them. Meanwhile, useful equipment sits unused nearby. The missing link is a convenient, trusted way to access it. Students need confidence that an item will be available and as described, while owners need reassurance that their belongings will be returned in good condition. Without that trust, sharing remains difficult and unnecessary purchases continue.
BorderBloom
Thousands of students move abroad to study after being sold false hope. Many agents and consultancies earn commission per enrolment, so they push students towards whichever university pays most and promise easy jobs, high salaries and simple paths to residency. The reality is often different: students struggle to find work in their field, underestimate living costs, and end up in debt, while their families have invested their savings. Honest, independent information about study programmes, job prospects and real costs is hard to find, leaving students and parents to make one of the biggest decisions without the full picture.
CORE (Constructing resilience)
CORE aims to deploy community-led engineering solutions in Sint Maarten to address hurricane vulnerability, drought, and food insecurity. Before going to Sint Maarten, we are conducting research to understand the problems. This research will be the basis of our work there. Four main problems were highlighted during the research. Many people avoid emergency shelters during severe weather due to deportation fears. Waste from Hurricane Irma in 2017 remains unmanaged, leading to many fires. 70% of the buildings were destroyed or damaged from Irma because the roofs are not suited for the extreme climate conditions. Finally, Sint Maarten imports 99.3% of its food, leaving the population severely exposed to supply chain disruptions.
Healthway
International students arriving in the Netherlands must quickly decide which health insurance they are legally required or allowed to have and register with a GP, but the rules depend on their situation (EU/non-EU, working or not, city) and the information is scattered across universities, government sites, insurers and comparison platforms. Of the students we interviewed, 72% felt unsure or were unregistered. Many remain uninsured or without a GP in their first months and only discover the gaps when they get sick. Meanwhile, insurers struggle to reach them at the moment they decide.
Kolibair
When a large incident hits, the people leading the response in fire brigades, forestry, and coast guard need a continuous, current picture of what is happening. They don't have one. The tools available to them were built for other purposes, so the information that reaches command is late, fragmented, and incomplete.
FreshersNest
The information gap. In our first two months we listed 100 events and 157 committee recruitments. No student could have known about all of them, because opportunities are scattered across lots of Instagram pages. The social barrier. Students, especially first-years, will not attend an event alone and step out of their comfort zone, so they are likely to skip opportunities due to this fear. The high friction. Applying means finding and filling a separate Google Form for every event and recruitment, re-entering the same details each time. The lack of transparency. Among almost 40 associations, nobody can tell a student which ones are genuinely active, so a student can give a year of their time to a committee that turns out to be worthless.
Biodetect Diapers
Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are among the most common infections in elderly care, yet they are often missed or diagnosed late. This is due to, among other things, incontinence, atypical symptoms and cognitive decline. Additionally, current testing relies on dipsticks, which are prone to false positives, and lab cultures, which are slow and require a clean urine sample that is hard to obtain. The result: delayed treatment, avoidable hospitalisations, unnecessary antibiotic use and extra pressure on already overstretched care staff.
