Innovators, start-ups and makers of all sorts in Europe are working to develop innovative solutions to be deployed in the short-term to alleviate the negative consequences of the corona crisis. This work complements what researchers are doing in areas such as vaccines. There are five areas that have been identified as targets for these innovative solutions: Health & Medicine, Business Continuity, Social Cohesion, Protection of Risk Groups, and Education.
We all know that hospitals and elderly residences are having problems with supplies in health material, from respirators to masks. Business continuity is also disrupting the economy in many European Member States. Students are moving into e-learning without a transition phase. All these issues need urgent short-term solutions that only innovators and startups can provide in a fast an efficient way.
Many online hackathons have been organised across Europe since the beginning of March. There have been hackathons in Estonia, Finland, Poland, Italy, Belgium, and many more are also planned to take place in the coming weeks. The largest hackathon has been the one organised in Germany on 20 March for 48 hours with 42869 participants who developed 800 projects.
Together with European society, the European Commission is looking for solutions to challenges related to the coronavirus. Between 24 and 26 April, the first pan-European hackathon is organised to address the very acute problem of COVID-19. The Pan-European hackathon #EUvsVirus is a joint event between the European Commission and actors from similar national initiatives from Member States on whose experiences the EU hackathon is building. It is expected a participation of 60k European citizens to #EuvsVirus hackathon.
Innovators from all industries, as well as committed citizens, are invited to take part in this important event. Participation is possible on the dedicated website https://euvsvirus.org/ and on Twitter at #EUvsVirus. The hackathon offers a common organizational and technical framework in which the participants can get involved online and develop working prototypes and solutions for technically, politically and socially relevant issues with regard to the corona crisis. It aims at commonly developing innovative solutions, e.g. high tech, low tech, hardware, software, etc., using biotech, digital tech, societal science and other innovation domains.
The event will be open to the European community of innovators, startups, makers, retailers, public and private buyers, end users etc. The overarching purpose of this event is to match-make and connect innovators, partners, buyers across Europe for the benefit of addressing imminent corona crisis issues (e.g. fast production of equipment, scaling up production capabilities, knowledge and solutions transfer from one country to another) and across various technological fields.
#EUvsVirus will allow for the submission of ideas and creation of teams in all EU languages. This means that there will be teams composed of individuals from several EU Member States and others where the participants will come exclusively from one MS. We do not want to miss any good idea simply because it is not in English.