2012 Quebec Entrepreneurship Contest: two grand prizes!
June 28, 2012
At the 14th Grands prix Desjardins Gala of the Quebec Entrepreneurship Contest, on June 20 in Quebec City, two firms including members of the HEC Montréal community and benefiting from the services of the Centre d'entrepreneurship HEC-POLY-UdeM were honoured: Novothermic Technologies inc. and Tactus Scientific.
First of all, the Novothermic Technologies inc. team, consisting of Guillaume Lacroix (MSc 2011), Manuel Théberge (PhD student), Benoît Champoux (Master’s in Mechanical Engineering, Université de Sherbrooke), Loïc Frohn-Villeneuve (Master’s in Mechanical Engineering, Université Laval) and Marc-Antoine Legault (Master’s in Mechanical Engineering, Université de Sherbrooke), won no less than the Grand Prize for Young Entrepreneurs, in the Business Creation category, along with a cash prize of $20,000.
Novothermic Technologies inc. is an energy efficiency company that invented an intelligent water pre-heater. The jury members were impressed not only by the demonstration of potential short-term savings, but also by the social benefits of the project based on sustainable development, since part of the profits goes to a community organization. They also lauded the entrepreneurs’ painstaking risk analysis and the strategies they developed in response.
Then, François Bergeron (MBA 2010) and Ivan Pavlov (Research Assistant, McGill University) and Tiberius Brastaviceanu (Master’s in nuclear medicine and radiobiology, Université de Sherbrooke) received the $5,000 accompanying the Research and Development Prize, in the Business Creation category. Their company, Tactus Scientific, designs, produces and markets miniature force/displacement sensor devices for biomedical, scientific and industrial applications, based on new fibre-optic technology. The jury appreciated the innovative project, a lengthy and unswerving research and development process that led to a clearly useful product.
About the Quebec Entrepreneurship Contest
The goal of the contest is to support the development of entrepreneurship in Quebec by offering scholarships and prizes for young students (from elementary school to university) and new entrepreneurs. There are thre levels: local, regional and provincial. For the 2012 edition of the contest, 3,490 projects and 46,988 participants competed for over $500,000 in prizes.
Note that Zayat Aroma inc. (founder: Eloï Abraham Zayat, MSc student, International Business option), IZichem (founders: Tarek Kassem (MBA 2010) and William Lubell and Julian Zhu, both from the Université de Montréal), and Électrobac (founder: Philip Bénard, Graduate Diploma in Public Accountancy student), were winners in the regional finals.
The Novothermic Technologies inc. team, from left to right: Manuel Théberge, Guillaume Lacroix, Benoît Champoux, Marc-Antoine Legault and Loïc Frohn-Villeneuve.
Photo: Éric Carrière
The Tactus Scientific team: François Bergeron, Tiberius Brastaviceanu and Ivan Pavlov.
Photo: Louise Leblanc