On March 7, 2022, the fifth "Ford Uber Innovation Challenge" initiated by Ford Motor (China) Co., Ltd. officially launched recruitment for colleges and universities across the country. In 2022, the newly launched event will open a new track of "smart cockpit", restart the offline "Ford Uex Innovation Training Camp", and continue to support the personal ability improvement of young players and the sustainable development of innovative projects with more generous bonuses and more professional counseling.
In order to actively respond to the national digital strategy and promote the construction of digital society, Ford China gives full play to the advantages of enterprise technical resources and empowers young people in the digital age, adding a "smart cockpit" track in the 2022 "Ford Uex Innovation Challenge" to encourage and help young people explore the design scheme of "emotional exchange in the intelligent cockpit" and provide a broad platform for youth technological innovation.
"The smart cockpit represents the development direction of the future car," said Chen Anning, president and CEO of Ford China, "We hope to inspire, explore and cultivate the innovative spirit of the young generation through the guidance of the new track, and perfectly integrate more digital technologies into the intelligent cockpit, so that people can achieve emotional communication between people and cars, and cultivate more young talents for the realization of a warm human-computer interaction experience." ”
At the same time, the special link "Ford UMG Innovation Training Camp" that has been interrupted for two years due to the epidemic is also planned to be restarted this year, and the project teams selected as the top 8 project teams in the country in the 2022 "Ford Uber Innovation Challenge" will have the opportunity to participate in it. This year's "Ford Excellence Innovation Training Camp" will continue to upgrade, launching innovative project design, business logic polishing, business simulation, Ford professional engineer skill transfer and other training sections based on lean entrepreneurship, fully combined with "competition, training, training", systematically improving the participants' business thinking, project design logic, roadshow level and technical level. Participating students will also have the opportunity to experience models such as Ford EVOS, the new generation of Ford Mondeo, and Ford's leading smart cockpit digital interaction technology under the leadership of Ford engineers and coaches.
The 2022 "Ford Uber Innovation Challenge" has also made adjustments to the award setting and the amount of the prize, adding the annual theme award, the best idea award, the best communication award and the outstanding individual award, ford motor hopes to give innovative youth leadership support to help the sustainable development of innovative projects in the field of mobility.
The Ford Uber Innovation Challenge aims to be the number one brand in the field of youth mobility innovation empowerment, and the previous four competitions have attracted more than 2,800 young people from 161 universities in nine countries around the world to participate in 463 projects. A total of 157 Ford engineers were assembled to provide participants with more than 1,500 hours of enabling training.
In the four competitions, many outstanding projects and teams have also emerged. The winner of the first "Ford U-Company Innovation Challenge", the project from the Pu Han team of graduate students of Nanjing University of Technology, the winning project has received a million yuan level Pre-A round of investment, and Pu Han himself was also selected into the "2019 Forbes China Under 30 Elite List" of the industrial manufacturing industry elite list. The second winner of the second competition, from Anhui University of Science and Technology' project "Machine Vision Makes Travel Multiple "Eyes" - Water Depth Warning", the team completed the reply to the software book patent in 2021 and successfully applied for two international patents. The winner of the fourth competition, the "Prefabricated Wireless Charging Intelligent Pavement" project from Nanjing University of Technology, combines magnetic coupling wireless transmission technology with prefabricated pavement to make the brain hole of electric vehicles charging while driving into reality.
In the future, Ford Motor will uphold the vision of "building a better world and helping people travel freely to realize their dreams", continue to stimulate youth innovation actions, create a youth innovation incubation platform, and cultivate more innovative talents for the sustainable development of the industry.