The Netherlands: Paints and Coatings Akzo Nobel Announces its "Paint the Future" Startup Challenge

Calling all startups, scale-ups, entrepreneurs and innovators, Akzo Nobel started the first edition of its "Paint the Future - the startup challenge" to discover new and revolutionary solutions that are intended accelerate innovation in the world of paints and coatings.

Amsterdam/The Netherlands — The challenge is to connect bright minds and promising solutions from across the globe with the company's expertise, global scale and resources. Innovators, challenge teams, institutions and industry experts will work together to enhance the submitted ideas, forming a truly collaborative ecosystem. Spearheaded by the company's Chief Technology Officer Klaas Kruithof, Paint the Future offers winners the opportunity to accelerate commercialization of their solution.

Interested participants can register on the challenge's website to join the platform, submit solutions and contribute industry expertise as part of the community.

Launched in partnership with KPMG, the challenge focuses on five key areas:

• Smart application

• Enhanced functionality

• Circular solutions

• Life science infusion

• Predictable performance

The deadline for new submissions is March 1, 2019, and participants on the platform will continue to explore, discuss and enrich ideas until March 12, after which AkzoNobel experts will select finalists to participate in the finals event in Amsterdam May 14 to 16. Shortly thereafter, the company will begin working with winners on sustainable business opportunities.

Brief challenge descriptions:

Smart application - How could your solution change or improve the way customers apply our products?

Enhanced functionality - What exciting new functionality can your technology offer to make coatings cleaner, more responsive or adaptive?

Circular solutions - How would your solution enable circular use of materials at any point in our value chain?

Life science infusion - How can your solution, containing bio-active technology, help bring better performance or innovative features to our coatings?

Predictable performance - How can we collect and augment data more innovatively to make predictions for real world surface performance more accurate?

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