Report from Epson Innovation Challenge in Taiwan 2025: Startups pioneering new possibilities through co-creation

• The Epson Innovation Challenge was held in Taiwan for the first time, under the slogan "Creating to the Future."
• Learn about a collection of next-generation solutions for education, daily life, and entertainment that integrate printing, scanning, and AI.
• Future-oriented co-creation is expanding the possibilities for real-world services and cross-border business collaboration.

In April 2025, Epson Taiwan Technology & Trading Ltd. (ETT) held its first Epson Innovation Challenge, a competition to come up a solutions business that integrates printing, scanning, and AI. Participants made full use of the Epson Connect API¹ cloud service, which was upgraded in March 2025, to propose solutions aimed at addressing customer challenges in education, daily life, entertainment, and Taiwanese culture. We bring you a report on this wild seven-week-long event.

Epson Innovation Challenge 2025 was held under the theme "Creating to the Future," with the goal of developing future-oriented solutions that integrate printing, scanning, and AI technologies.

Recruitment began in December 2024. A total of 98 teams, including startups and students, submitted their ideas. After a rigorous document screening process, 26 of those teams (91 participants in total) were selected to compete in the main event.
During the selection process, participants were given a technical lecture on the Epson Connect API by Epson Taiwan's engineering team. They also got hands-on mentoring on business model development and pitching from leading venture capitalists in Taiwan. This support system helped teams refine their ideas from both a technological and commercialization perspective. Demo Day, the final judging event, was held on April 19, 2025, and the winning teams were announced.

The climax of the event, Demo Day, was held in two sessions, morning (the first round) and afternoon (the second round). In the first round, five judges visited the presentation tables of all 26 teams one by one. They experienced the service prototypes and demos up close, evaluating the feasibility of the ideas and the quality of the user experience. Each team creatively showcased their unique demo experience by leveraging the API-AI combination. For example, some teams brought in custom display panels tailored to limited space, while others had judges interact directly with their apps, leaving a strong impression of the service's practicality.

After the first round, 10 teams were selected by the judges to advance to the final pitch session in the second round. These finalists presented their ideas on stage in front of an audience of over 100 people. A wide range of projects was showcased that created new added value in everyday life-such as in education, daily living, culture, and entertainment-through the integration of cutting-edge technologies like generative AI, voice recognition, and AI-OCR with the Epson Connect API.

Let's take a look at the award-winning teams and their innovative projects from Epson Innovation Challenge in Taiwan 2025.

Epson Innovation Challenge is more than just a business idea contest. The proposals generated here are seen as projects for real-world implementation, projects that integrate the Epson Connect API and hardware to solve customer issues. These ideas are expected to evolve into next steps through open innovation with a diverse range of companies, organizations, and institutions. Epson Taiwan will now begin supporting the award-winning teams in the commercialization and market deployment of their services.

Epson sees that printing is no longer just an output method-it is becoming a hub that connects services and user experiences. We will thus continue to promote the co-creation of value through open innovation, not only in Taiwan but globally, while providing IoT edge devices and platforms. There are some exciting upcoming events, so please stay tuned.