For the second year, the Isle of Man hosted the 2024 Innovation Challenge last week with businesses landing on Manx shores from across the globe.

The competition sees participants of all stages of development invited to present ground-breaking solutions to address specific challenges and drive the growth of technical innovation in the island.

With more than 50 applications from 20 countries worldwide, Thursday’s final saw 13 finalists face their industry peers at the Comis Hotel.

And while we’d have loved to chat to all the finalists across the three categories; FinTech, Cleantech and Artificial Intelligence (AI), we focused on cleantech.

Jeremy Walsh is the co-founder and chief executive of Apnea Tech.

He told us that the most common form of sleep apnoea is known as obstructive sleep apnoea, and an accessible screening device is crucial to identify those with OSA that should be treated.

Mr Walsh said: ‘We set up our technology because my business partner, Andy Moss, has sleep apnoea.

‘We’ve both been in MedTech development and were actually competitors, but we had a discussion and stopped competing and decided to collaborate.

‘Sleep apnoea at the moment is hugely poorly diagnosed, it’s stopping breathing, and the way they monitor and diagnose it is they monitor everything but your breathing.

‘We set about developing a low cost, simple, purposeful technology.

‘It uses as few components as possible and we got government grants to do it, and from there we’ve almost immediately said we want to build in sustainability.

‘Now we diagnose sleep apnoea and it’s already in clinical trials’.

We asked Mr Walsh why the Isle of Man was at the forefront of the technology and why he entered Apnea Tech in to the Innovation Challenge 2024.

He said: ‘The reason we’re here is because we liked the concept of a complete jurisdiction for a test bed, to take our technology and be able to show the world that it really works and it’s increased in diagnosis and it’s simple to use.

‘The Isle of Man isa sufficiently large to be meaningful and sufficiently small that a small company like ours can come to it and say here’s the technology lets work together on implementing and finalising it.’

Marius Seteu and Cath Robertshaw, of EyeSea, told us why they entered the Innovation Challenge and how important it is to the island.

EyeSea was founded on the idea that the maritime industry, mariners, recreational sailors, and the public all want the best for the ocean.

And while majority of us all understand maritime pollution is a problem, many feel it’s too large to solve.

Eyesea is an app that allows anyone to take a picture of something in the ocean that doesn’t look right, and makes a map telling everyone where it is, whether to avoid the area, and for the relevant people to come and fix the issue.

And it allows the person posting the photo to remain completely anonymous.

Mr Seteu, the chief technology officer of Eysea, said: ‘About three months ago we got notified about the Innovation Challenge and we’d been doing a lot of work with the Isle of Man so thought lets try it.

‘One thing led to another and we made it to the finals, and it really got us thinking what are we going to do now and why the Isle of Man.

‘We realised the island is the perfect platform as its a UNESCO biosphere and what best way to save the biosphere by knowing what’s going on in it, and that’s what EyeSea is all about.

‘It’s about technology and people, and you can’t manage what you can measure!’

Catherine Robertshaw, chief operating officer, added: ‘The Innovation Challenge is fantastic, and I’m local to the Isle of Man but EyeSea has been embraced by the island and having meetings with the government that is able to acknowledge and understand and emphasise what’s going on has been fantastic and we really appreciate the really positive experience’.

Steve Clarke is the commercial director of Re-Universe.

Following our discussion with Mr Clarke, it was announced that his business had won the cleantech category award at the Innovation Challenge.

Re-universe helps organisations enable reuse or recycling initiatives for things like cups, with different models available including deposit return, penalty and rewards alongside RFID track and trace.

Mobile or non-mobile participation makes it even easier for people to return items.

Mr Clarke said: ‘We’re on a mission to rid the Isle of Man of single use cups, be that coffee cups, plastic pint glasses at the TT.

‘We calculated that there is roughly four and three quarter million coffee cups used on the island each year, and that’s mostly vegware compostable cups.

‘But there’s no composting facility on the island, so they all end up in the incinerator.

‘And that’s the worst of both worlds because it’s a really expensive cup, you can get much cheaper ones, but you’re not getting the carbon benefits.

‘We’re really keen to switch people to reuse, and there’s a huge enthusiasm from people on the island for this.’

Zak Johnson is the founder of the Revend Group, which already has a recycling vending machine in the Sea Terminal.

It offers people rewards for recycling back into the machine, and he expects more than 40 more of these machines to be across the island over the next three months.

He’s also currently looking for property to relocate to the Isle of Man, with a form of the business to come here.

He said: ‘For us to be here is important, we’ve been going for officially a year, and I started by making clothing with recycled plastic and changing it into uniforms.

‘I kept seeing plastic bottles being used, and I thought reverse vending machines were really interesting.

‘Maybe I could bring them in, and we’ll take the plastic.

‘We’ve got 210 reverse vending machines at the moment across the globe.

‘The Isle of Man hadn’t been on my radar, but 40 machines is a lot for the Isle of Man but not in the grand scheme of what we do, so it’s easy for us to deploy 40.

‘I’m looking at King William’s College, Ballakermeen, the airport, places where there is lots of people but also children.’