Singaporean team wins innovation challenge

Participants of the InCube Innovation Challenge in Singapore emerged champions, after spending 96 hours to develop a pitch on the theme of “Smart Construction Sites for a Smart Nation”. In the past four days, three students from NUS and two from SUTD have been living and breathing innovation in a glass cube beside the URA Centre. In response to the theme, the team’s answer is “Omnisight” – a 3D visualization platform to boost labour productivity with dynamic real-time worker allocation. Their pitch won them the first prize in the challenge, which was announced in the early morning of 1 October.

The student-led initiated by the ETH Entrepreneur Club at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) began in 2017 and is brought to Singapore for the first time with the support of the Singapore-ETH Centre, Swiss Embassy in Singapore, and Hilti Corporation.
The four teams in Switzerland and Singapore were given different themes, including smart construction sites; energy conservation; intelligent, connected and sustainable cities; and embracing consumer needs for product R&D.

The construction industry is a sizeable one worth US$17 trillion. However, productivity in this industry has fallen over the years. “Why?” asked Jonathan Ng (25), a Engineering Product Development student at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. “Because 63 percent of direct labour time is spent waiting. For a US$100-million project, delays can cost US$100,000 a day.”

In an industry where delays are costly, workers have been known to be either waiting for materials, equipment, transport, weather, or instructions. In four days, the team not only found the pain point for the construction industry, but also a solution to make real-time task allocation at construction sites possible. Their proposed software, Omnisight, digitalises the construction site, analyses worker activities and provides smart recommendations to supervisors to improve productivity on their sites.