Time to present this year’s Masters of Social Impact! Jury was looking for projects that use innovative solutions to effectively address social challenges, empower underrepresented groups, and drive positive social change. Here’s our winners. The award was presented by Elżbieta Wojciechowska, CEO of Fundacja Digital Universtity.
Grand Prize Winner: Polski Fundusz Rozwoju
The awarded organisation invests where private capital still hesitates. The Innovate Poland programme keeps the most promising Polish companies in the country by providing them with capital to scale, without forcing them into premature sales to foreign investors. The defence hackathons organised by the PFR brought together hundreds of participants and gave rise to projects that save lives – such as technology for treating antibiotic-resistant infections in field conditions. Mobilising capital in the service of security and sovereignty – this is what social impact looks like on a national scale.
Honorable mentions
Fundacja WłączeniPlus (projekt We did it in Poland)
The recognised foundation set itself a goal that many would consider overly ambitious – to change the way Poles think about themselves. A catalogue featuring more than one hundred Polish innovations, along with exhibitions in dozens of countries, is opening doors for Polish companies in markets where they were previously unknown. But the campaign begins even earlier – educational materials presenting Polish inventions and achievements have reached 10,000+ teachers and 5,000+ schools, because national pride is built from the earliest years of education.
BioCam
The recognised project turns the logic of endoscopy on its head. Instead of a hospital visit and anaesthesia – a capsule, a home setting, and thirty minutes of image analysis performed by an AI algorithm. Diagnostic time has been reduced more than tenfold, while the cost of the examination is two to three times lower than with traditional technologies. A painless test that can be carried out at home may encourage more people to undergo preventive screening – and that quite literally means lives saved.
Congratulations!