The Sprint to Innovate: The Innovation Challenge was hosted by Red River College (RRC) Polytech from January 29th to February 1st, 2026 in Winnipeg, Manitoba with significant support from sponsors and volunteers in the community.
Sprint to Innovate provides post-secondary students from varied disciplines such as technology, business, entrepreneurship, and more with the opportunity to work together solving real business challenges, learning about innovation while collaborating in a fun and exciting way over a 3 day period.
Each team was comprised of between 4 to 6 students and had to choose from a list of available business challenges that were provided by industry. Each team worked together with support from mentors as well as business representatives from each challenge, to create a solution that included developing a prototype along with a presentation to be presented to judges on the final day.
CIPS Manitoba‘s team consisting of Suvojit De, Gary Craven, I.S.P. (ret.), and Linda Hunter, I.S.P. (ret.) submitted a business challenge that could be considered by any one of the teams. The challenge was as follows:
- Organizations are overwhelmed by rapidly growing AI-related information but struggle to turn it into practical, trusted knowledge for their workforce. How might we design an AI-powered Knowledge Management System that helps organizations collect, organize, prioritize, and share AI knowledge in the right format, for the right people, at the right time – so they can build an AI-ready workforce.
Further details to support this challenge were provided to all the teams and 5 teams decided to take on this challenge: 1) Sprinters; 2) Tech Innovators; 3) SprintSphere; 4) Sprinting to Innovate; 5) Data Scientist Assembly.
There was a networking event on Thursday, January 29, 2026 to kickoff the weekend with some general hints and tips on the expectations plus a Design Thinking and Pitch Presentation by Al McLeod to help the teams get started. The teams were given the opportunity to meet with the business representative and mentors to ask any questions later in the day on Friday as well as on Saturday morning. And then they were off and running, putting together their proposed solutions and presentations and pitches for Sunday.
There were 5 teams that had taken on the CIPS Manitoba challenge, so the Manitoba reps had to judge them and determine which one would go to the finals. The work that all teams completed in 48 hours to understand the problem and the process and then to come up with a proposed solution and presentation was amazing and made the job of determining which team to choose from extremely difficult.
Team #3 SprintSphere was chosen based on their understanding of the challenge, approach and solution to the problem and the engaging presentation. Then they competed against the winning teams from the other 4 challenges. Each team was allowed 7 minutes to complete their presentations to three judges who had 3 minutes to ask questions.
CIPS Manitoba was extremely pleased that SprintSphere won 2nd place. Congratulations to Team members Priya Pandey, Pyae Phone Htoo, Akshay Krishna, Dev Kishore Sarthi, Sayed Saminur Rahman and Arundhatti Muthu for doing such a fantastic job. This is one team that has an amazing future ahead of it. Thanks to each of them for making CIPS Manitoba’s presence at this event so special!