Launch of Data Pitch

Data Pitch is an EU-funded open innovation programme bringing together corporate and public-sector organisations that collect and hold data with startups and SMEs that work with such data. It is centred around a competition with several tracks which describe challenges, and a virtual accelerator programme (six months) to help startups and SMEs develop solutions to meet these challenges. The 2017-2018 programme was opened for applications on 1 July.

If you are interested, you can start by reading the challenges set out on the challenge page and select the challenge that you would like to solve with data. You can choose from twelve different challenges in three different tracks:

• Data Provider Challenges: These challenges are set by data providers and the solutions for these challenges will need to use the datasets provided by data providers. You can include other datasets in your solution as long as the data providers' dataset is incorporated and the solution addresses the specific problem described by the challenge.
• Sector Challenges: These challenges are more general and can be solved with a combination of closed, shared and Open Data. You need to state the data that you are using in your application and verify that you have access to it.
• Open Innovation Challenge: This challenge welcomes any other innovative data companies who have access to shared data and would like to suggest a solution.

The call is open until 1 October 2017, and the ambition of the programme is to create an innovation ecosystem for Europe, where larger organisations work closely with agile start-ups to innovate and learn from each other, using (Open) Data as an enabler to solve problems.