The Digital Innovation Challenge Bootcamp: The finalists

The Digital Innovation Challenge is reaching its final stages. This challenge was launched in Lisbon during the Web Summit 2019, the world’s largest technology conference. A co-creation boot camp, which took place over three days (28–30 September) in a virtual reality environment, brought together the top 10 candidates and announced three finalists, some of which are using our solutions. 

Through this Challenge, the European Commission aims to experiment with new ways for engaging with SMEs and startups to re-imagine how open and reusable solutions are created and promoted, stimulate awareness and, ultimately, increase their adoption. There is a financial reward of up to 50,000 EUR for first place, 20,000 EUR for second place and 10,000 EUR for third place.

The 10 finalists, who stood out from approximately 50 candidates, presented their ideas, worked with coaches to further develop them and connected with people from the European Commission and other SMEs and startups. The Digital Innovation Challenge gave SMEs the opportunity to build and expand while at the same time improving their awareness and knowledge of the open and reusable solutions provided by the European Commission. After the presentation of the 10 initiatives, the jury was asked to evaluate them based on the added value of using one or more open and reusable solutions, the feasibility to move forward in the implementation and the clarity of their pitch/vision and chose three winning initiatives: 

• Open Content/ OpenCityPlus introduces an open source e-government platform that offers support to local authorities in the digital transformation of their services. Open Content is compliant with Core Vocabularies, CPSV-AP and DCAT-AP.
• CleverBooks/ Sustainable Digital Education provides augmented reality books and maps aiming to support future-ready skills for children around the world, addressing the growing workforce skills gap from an early stage.
• Latitudo40/Earth Analytics aspires to provide everyone with easy access to satellite images by bringing together data and algorithms from multiple sources and providing straightforward information to understand our planet from above. 

The final results will be announced at the Hello Tomorrow summit on 16–19 November.