People in 141 countries participated in the event.īuilding on this experience, three EU-led hackathons took place this month: the European Big Data Hackathon, organised by EuroStat the EMODnet Open Sea Lab hackathon, organised by European Marine Observation and Data Network ( EMODnet) and the Cassini hackathon, organised by the EU Agency for the Space Programme.Įach had a similar goal of encouraging participants to delve into huge EU-funded datasets to address societal and environmental challenges. That generated 117 potential products and services including a patient monitoring system that minimised the need for physical contact between nurses and patients, a remote queuing app to ensure social distancing in shops, and a sewer surveillance platform for detecting the virus in wastewater, to help decision makers direct resources where they were most needed.
Hackathons are another route to generating products and services, as the European Commission discovered during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the EIC organised the EUvsVirus hackathon. The focus on translation is evident in the greater emphasis in Horizon Europe - compared to the forerunning Horizon 2020 - on supporting innovation, and forming and growing companies, including making equity investments through the European Innovation Council (EIC).
The aim is to overcome the long-running ‘European paradox’ that Europe is a science superpower in terms of what comes out of its laboratories, but fails to extract full value of this knowledge because it lags in translation and commercialisation. Taking a leaf out of the corporate playbook, the EU is turning to hackathons as a way of opening up data generated in the research that it funds to fresh eyes and multi-discipline expertise, in a bid to spark innovation.
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