11 March, 2016

Alex Sheehan, Eoin McCarthy and Myat Min were the winners of the Enactus CIT Social Innovation Award 2016 Sponsored by EMC, with a prize of €1,000, for their hand-held water purification device combating the lack of clean drinking water locally and in third world countries.
This award represents socially innovative ideas that make a positive impact on individuals and communities. The overall prize is given to students who take entrepreneurial action to empower people in an economically, socially and environmentally sustainable way.
The Social Innovation trophy itself is a beautifully designed bespoke piece and was designed by the talented Luke Sisk, a graduate of CIT Crawford College of Art and Design. His inspiration for the piece was to combine the three key elements of what “innovation” means to him: thinking, doing/making and informing.
The inaugural Enactus CIT Social Innovation competition, sponsored by EMC and held during Cork Institute of Technology’s Innovation Week, which took part during the second week of March, also gave €250 prizes to both the Best Individual Idea and the Best Team Idea. The former was awarded to Aaron Dennehy for his wheelchair accessibility app, while the The Best Team Idea went to Leah Corbett, Alison Fogarty, Rachel Manzke and Ronan Bradbury for their idea to create a non-profit, impermanent urban community arts centre.