We have experienced 82 exciting competition days: final voting closed on 21 November, and on Monday, 24 November 2014, we announced the winner at a ceremony held at the Vivo Catering premises in Ljubljana. The winner of the Everything=Possible! competition is the Calypso project, and the winning idea of the Enterprise challenge, rewarded by the company Si.Mobil with EUR 5,000 worth of products and services, is the project BrightLes, or BrightWood in English. A lucky winner was also selected among those who voted for the project, and was rewarded with 6-months’ use of a Fiat 500c leased by the competition partner Veit Team.

The competition organiser, KD Funds, together with its partners and the 8-member jury has for the second consecutive year motivated Slovenia to think in terms of inspiring projects, set daring goals and create great teams. Luka Podlogar, the President of the Management Board, commented upon the announcement of the competition winner: “We at KD Funds are aware of our engagement with the local and global environment. We know that in addition to doing responsible business, taking up activities in the field of corporate responsibility is our obligation. We wish to co-shape the environment where bold projects expressing courage, clear goals and inspiration turn into success stories. For us, organising this competition means investing in development. And because everything is possible, we believe that the projects taking part in our competition may have the potential to become the future generators of economic growth in the region. The winners of today’s competition are aspiring researchers who believe that knowledge brings progress and that with every step they take in their projects they are pushing the boundaries of what is possible, millimetre by millimetre. Congratulations to the Calypso team!”.

The winners of the second Everything=Possible! competition are students from the Gimnazija Vič secondary school. For three years they have been working on a submarine that will make it possible to explore the very last undiscovered of our planet hiding deep below the surface of the sea. They called the submarine Calypso and sent it out to explore the Slovenian sea this summer. After the successful trial, the submarine will now be moved to a new hydrodynamic shell. It is the work of 40 courageous students who spend their afternoons in the school workshop, researching, inventing and pushing the boundaries millimetre by millimetre at each session. Miha Majetič, a student representing the winning Calypso project, says: “Of course we are thrilled about the prize. Seeing how many people support us and our work gives us even more enthusiasm to keep creating. We will first complete our Calypso submarine, which we plan to launch in the Slovenian sea in March next year. And then we will go on with new technical projects. We are definitely not running out of ideas, and we are already looking forward to new challenges”.

In addition to the main prize, an extra prize was presented in the Everything=Possible! competition. The Si.Mobil jury selected their own winner of the Enterprise challenge, namely the project entitled BrightWood, and presented the young innovators with a prize of EUR 5,000 worth of products and services. The project is about an innovative wood products line that creates a synergy of wood and light.

For more information about the project, go to http://www.vsejemogoce.si/

KD Skladi (KD Funds in English) is Slovenia’s foremost fund management operation. It is part of KD Group, one of the country’s largest investment, insurance, capital investments and fund management groups with over €1bn assets under management at the group level, of which around half lies within the asset management division. It also claims an impressive list of firsts in a region where investing in funds is a relatively new phenomenon. It runs the country’s oldest mutual fund KD Galileo and created Slovenia’s first fund of funds and money market fund.KD Skladi was established in 1994 as the first Slovenian asset manager. It took over the running of the Galileo fund two years later. The fund in January 2012 celebrated its twentieth anniversary with pleasing results for investors in its top-down, bottom-up flexible global portfolio. Over the fund’s lifetime, initial investors made more money than they would have tracking the MSCI World or MSCI Emerging Markets indices. Returns were higher than those of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway fund, despite the devastating effects of the financial crisis on portfolio values. Since Slovenia joined the European Union in 2004, KD Skladi has developed its investment skills and reach. It now runs 14 funds covering global, emerging, regional and country- and sector-specific remits. It has also attracted a growing number of European investors to its locally domiciled funds that specialise in South East European equities. The KD Balkans fund typifies the firm’s approach to markets in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. Some markets are already classified as emerging and well integrated with the EU. Others remain outside, either on the path to integration or remaining true frontier market status. Croatia is expected to join the EU in July this year.