Bocconi wins with the smart CyanoFix sticker

Each year the international Henkel Innovation Challenge invites university students and post-grads to develop innovative, sustainable ideas for new products or technologies in the adhesives, beauty care, and laundry & homecare sectors.
The winners of the eighth national edition in Italy are Tommaso Bressa and Iva Mladenovic of the Bocconi University of Milan. Both twenty-two years old and students of marketing management, they were awarded first prize for their project titled “CyanoFix”, a smart cyanoacrylate adhesive for medical applications.
The objective of their project was to use this class of adhesives to increase the effectiveness of surgical operations and treat the pathologies that tend to be associated with the Western world, such as cardiovascular disease.
In one of the future visions of the two students, by the year 2050 it will be possible to inject an adhesive directly into the patient’s circulatory system to repair internal lesions, as is done for cerebral haemorrhages.
The jury recognized the excellent idea behind the project and the team’s ability to take a comprehensive view of people’s needs, imagining possible solutions that we will be able to produce with the technology of the future.
“The level of the projects presented this year was particularly high. We were amazed once again by the ability of these students to don the garb of innovators of the future, developing novel and well defended ideas,” stated Ambrogio Dossena, project coordinator for the Henkel Italia human resources department. “This year the participants placed a special emphasis on the digital dimension of their projects, demonstrating that innovation also comes through the use of new communicational idioms and modes.”
The Henkel Innovation Challenge has always been a channel for contact between the company and the best talents from the world’s universities. This year particular attention was dedicated to the selection process, which involved a number of interviews with the participants to single out the most promising young innovators.
This year 48 Italian teams joined the Challenge. Ten of them were selected for the national finals that took place at the Henkel facility in Milan. Each one of the semi-finalists was assigned a Henkel manager as mentor, who watched the entire project development process and provided help and advice. The students were thus able to gain invaluable field experience, working in direct contact with the company and using its resources, including a host of opportunities for e-learning and webinars.
Tommaso and Iva are now preparing themselves for the international finale of the competition, which will take place in Vienna on 8-11 April and witness a field of student contestants from 28 different countries. The winning team will win a trip around the world worth 10,000 euros. The second- and third-place finishers will also receive travel vouchers. The top three finishers will all have the chance to meet Kasper Rorsted, Henkel CEO, in person and discuss their innovative projects directly with him.