Science Award 2023 for the best solutions for trade

During Euroshop, around 200 top professionals celebrated the 16th Science Award ceremony at the invitation of the EHI Foundation and GS1 Germany as part of EuroShop in Düsseldorf. Start-ups, cooperations between universities, retail and industry as well as academic work were honoured. What they all have in common is that their approaches offer retail companies solutions for different challenges. This year, the prominent advisory board and jury honoured works and projects that deal with alternative raw materials, automated logistics solutions, machine learning, voice commerce and measurable advertising expenditure. The award is endowed with a total of 85,000 euros.

Laureates of the Science Award 2023
Startup eco:fibr: From pineapple harvest residues to industrially produced paper Paper is sustainable when it is made from alternative raw materials that either grow back quickly or are waste products. In Costa Rica today, 4.5 million tonnes of pineapple waste are chemically treated and then incinerated. Now, the start-up eco:fibr has developed an environmentally friendly process in which a pulp is obtained from these pineapple residues. This can offer the paper and packaging industry a sustainable alternative to conventional pulp made from wood. The eco:fibr plants can be set up directly on the plantations. In the future, it is also planned to use them for domestic plants in Europe and the USA.

Startup Filics: Intralogistics with shorter loading times and more usable space
Not least because of the increasing shortage of skilled workers, the demand for automation in intralogistics is high. The start-up Filics has therefore developed the so-called Filics Unit. It consists of two fully autonomous, skid-shaped forks that can drive under load carriers such as Euro pallets and move them without human intervention. Thanks to its compact design, the Filics Unit disappears completely under the load carrier during a transport job. This enables automated pallet transport with great efficiency gains in the face of space, time and personnel constraints.

Dissertation: Optimising content marketing with machine learning
Content marketing is a mainstay of digital marketing in the retail and consumer goods industries. It refers to customised content for SEO texts on websites. Until now, this has been time-consuming, costly and error-prone for companies. Academic publications also struggle with little literature and little available data. Dr. Martin Reisenbichler from the Vienna University of Economics and Business developed novel, partially automated methods for content generation in the application areas of search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine advertising (SEA) as part of his dissertation. The dissertation solves these problems for the first time with the help of the latest machine learning technologies (GPT, PPLM). The method learns dynamically from keyword-specific, always up-to-date search engine data and generates optimal content from it.

Master: Pricing for Voice Commerce
The market introduction of voice assistants and the increasing popularity of voice commerce create new opportunities to address consumers in a targeted manner and to establish optimised pricing strategies. Voice assistants function as human-like sales consultants. In the context of voice commerce, Tatjana Heiser (University of Mainz) examines behavioural pricing and word-of-mouth in her master’s thesis. With her comprehensive analysis, she makes a significant contribution to which modes of action and influencing factors play a role in the customers’ purchase intention.

Chair project: Measurable effects of advertising expenditure by online resellers
It is difficult for online resellers to correctly measure their advertising budget. Often they have to rely on empirical values, where it is not possible to check whether higher advertising expenditures generate more turnover or remain without any significant effect. These unknowns in the Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS) on online marketplaces have been uncovered by Prof. Dr. Bernd Skiera and Prof. Dr. Jochen Reiner (both Chair of Electronic Commerce, Goethe University Frankfurt) through an application using the example of Amazon Marketplace. The jury is particularly convinced by the scalability of the idea, which achieves a high relevance for online retailers.

The Science Award is supported by our partners Eye square, Ferrero, KPMG and Relex.