12 October 2015

The Université de Sherbrooke took home the most awards from the 2015 Forces Avenir gala. Its representatives won five awards, of which two were given to dynamic young businesses, La Fabrique and Oneka Technologies.

The cooperative La Fabrique garnered the Projet par Excellence award, along with a $15 000 bursary. This start up will soon unveil its new premises at the incubator-accelerator Espace-INC. The co-operative will provide access to tools, training sessions, and rental spaces, with the goal of encouraging the design and creation of prototyping and production projects. Its services are aimed at entrepreneurs, artists, and artisans.

For its part, Oneka Technologies took home the award in the Environment category and a $4000 bursary. The business, founded in January 2015 by Dragan Tutić and Renaud Lafortune, aims to market the autonomous, floating desalination system developed as part of the student project Odyssée. The technology, which uses the movement of waves to produce drinking water, enables the desalination of 10 000 litres of water per day.

On the information technology front, the Université de Sherbrooke’s computer programming workshops (APIUS – Ateliers de programmation en informatique de l’Université de Sherbrooke) won the award in the Science and Technology category. In January 2015, the third edition of its day of presentations, which has become a hackathon – Hack.sh –, brought together about 100 participants.

The Bonbons et bons dons project (Health category) and psychoeducation master’s student David Lalonde (Personality – Graduates) also won awards at the gala recognizing the volunteer engagement of students.

Source: Université de Sherbrooke
Photo credit: La Fabrique