The Digital Innovation Challenge has a winner!

The STEM-oriented teaching and learning solutions provider CleverBooks is the winner of the Digital Innovation Challenge. The results were announced on 18 November at Hello Tomorrow global summit.

The Digital Innovation Challenge invited SMEs and startups to innovate new services using the European Commission’s portfolio of open and reusable solutions. The competing projects used some of our solutions including Core Vocabularies, CPSV-AP and DCAT-AP. On 18 November at the Hello Tomorrow global summit, Mario Campolargo, acting Director-General of the DG for Informatics of the European Commission announced the winner and the two runners-up:

1. Winner of €50 000, CleverBooks – Sustainable Digital Education: Reusable Online Text- and Workbooks for Schools: Shaping digital education in Europe using Augmented Reality;
2. Winner of €20 000, Latitudo40 – Earth Analytics: Supporting everyday decisions by turning satellite imagery into geospatial information; and
3. Winner of €10 000, OpenContent – OpenCityPlus: Driving small and medium municipalities in Europe towards integrating into the Single Digital Gateway.

Beyond hearing the finalists' pitches, the participants had the chance to discuss the importance of creating an innovative Digital Europe and the fundamental role digital public administrations, SMEs and start-ups can play in this.

Emanuele Baldacci, Director for Digital Solutions at the Directorate-General for Informatics of the European Commission, moderated a 'fireside chat' reversing the roles and having high-level EU representatives addressing questions from the three finalists. The panel consisted of:

• Margarida Abecasis, Director for Infrastructure and Equipment, European Parliament;
• Mario Campolargo, Director-General (acting) at Directorate-General for Informatics, European Commission; and
• Raluca Peica, Director of Information Technology, Court of Justice of the European Union. 

The panellists highlighted the unique opportunity of the proposed Next Generation EU to support digital and GovTech initiatives, the support that the public sector should give to foster innovation together with the private sector (through platforms and infrastructures) and the importance of access to (public) open data to provide new opportunities to companies for developing new services and products.

Have you missed the event? The recordings are now available.