Student Story of the Month: an IÉSEG student wins an international innovation challenge
02/06/2019
Sébastien Bezout and Martin Nguyen
In February 2018, Sébastien Bezout, IÉSEG student, and his best friend Martin Nguyen, won first prize in the traveler category of the international innovation challenge “Play Your Airport,” organized by the ADP Group (Paris Airport). With their project Travel & Share, an intelligent platform that brings together travelers in airports, they won plane tickets to go on a round-the-world tour. They returned to France recently, and are preparing the next part of their project.
The ADP competition brought together around 2,000 participants (in 4 categories: students, start-ups, travelers, and ADP Group employees) from 77 countries to imagine the airport of the future.
Sébastien and Martin’s project aims to bring together travelers in airports via a virtual platform and with physical zones dedicated to travelers’ exchanges. This will take the form of an application or a function installed in terminals in waiting rooms, so that each traveler can indicate what they wish to share (a particular destination, for example). The people connected to it will be able to agree on a place to meet in the airport, which will allow them to share their travel advice and to spend their time in a nice way while waiting for their flights.
“IÉSEG has provided me a lot in terms of innovation, a subject that I am particularly passionate about, starting from my first year with the Business Exploration course. All of the skills that I needed for this project are skills that we develop at IÉSEG over 5 years: creativity, organization, ability to synthesize, logistics, and also how to convince an audience with a short and efficient presentation,” Sébastien explained. In the framework of the last stage of the competition, Sébastien presented their project at the ADP headquarters in front of 300 people and a jury.
After the grand finale, airplane tickets in hand, Sebastien and Martin left for several months to do a world tour of Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, Japan, Vietnam and Cambodia.
Back in France since January 2019, they are planning to apply to integrate the ADP Group Innovation Hub, which was launched recently and already supports over 800 start-ups in their projects.