InnoCAPE Hackathon reached good results – finally

Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences (SeAMK) has been participating in a project called” Industry 4.0: transforming innovation ecosystem through better capacity of public enablers (InnoCAPE)” (InnoCAPE, n.d.-a).  The project has been financed by European Regional Development Fund for Baltic Sea Region as well as partners are coming from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (InnoCAPE, n.d.-b).

As one of the objectives each partner country was required to organize a hackathon. For Finland we, together with the University of Oulu, targeted university students involving challenges from local companies or organizations. In preparation for the event an industrial case to be used was selected based on an inquiry sent out to SMEs by the local chamber of commerce in South Ostrobothnia. The hackathon was planned to take place in the spring of 2021 as a series of five events spanning roughly one month period but had to be cancelled at the last minute due to lack of participants. All the planned hackathon contents sessions including keynote sessions were recorded and published separately for potential later use, whenever the hackathon would be realized.

With the project getting extension to the end of the year, a new plan was introduced to arrange the hackathon in the autumn. During the summer the sOULUtions hackathon concept developed by Oulu University of Applied Sciences was discovered and after vacations, talks were started to have them facilitate the event (sOulutions, n.d.).

The hackathon was eventually organized as three-day virtual event via Microsoft Teams -platform on November 3-5, 2021. The participants were divided into three teams that tackled two separate challenges covering different health care related issues. The challenge received initially for spring event, on further development of smart furniture platform, was still in and worked on by two of the teams. The company representatives stopped by during the event to answer questions and gave feedback on final presentations. The second challenge related to use of medical data gathered on persons and how it could be utilized.

At the hackathon there were a total of 18 participants, among of whom one participant was from the University of Oulu, one from Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences and 16 from Oulu University of Applied Sciences. No special rewards were awarded as this was an optional course, the students still had to make a written report to receive study points. At the final presentation the organizations setting the challenges were very satisfied on results achieved during the hackathon.

Juha-Matti Arola
Expert, RDI
SeAMK Technology

Mika Valkama
Expert, RDI
SeAMK Technology

Sources:
InnoCAPE. (n.d. -a). About InnoCAPE project. https://innocape.eu/about/
InnoCAPE. (n.d. -b). Partners. https://innocape.eu/#partners
sOULUtions. (n.d.). sOULUtions. https://www.soulutions.fi/