The DigiFed Digital Challenge: bringing together industry and innovation across Europe

Digital Catapult is the UK’s Digital Innovation Hub for DigiFed, a network of innovation hubs across Europe funded by Horizon 2020. It has created sustainable cross-border services and partnerships between small and large businesses, universities, public bodies and research and technology organisations.

DigiFed’s most recent innovation pathway, the Digital Challenge, has been a match-funded opportunity for innovators working with advanced digital technologies to solve industry challenges set by participating European businesses. The challenge owner would be an early adopter of the chosen solution, and support its development with matched funding, industry expertise and access to pilot sites.

Creating mutually beneficial partnerships

Even with established and optimised operations and processes, large businesses can struggle to bring innovation into their organisations. In some cases, this may be down to a lack of resources, innovation culture or leadership capability. But in others, the challenge lies in identifying the right technology partner with the potential, skills and capability to deliver what’s needed.

The Digital Challenge programme solved this problem by uniquely leveraging a cross-border collaboration model. The Digital Innovation Hubs identified industry challenge owners from different countries and connected them with the startups and scaleups best placed to develop the strongest solutions. This offered the challenge owners an alternative way of procuring new suppliers beyond their country borders to accelerate their digital transformation journey.

Digital Challenge participants were selected through an open call, and the successful applicants received up to €110,000 (co-founded by DigiFed and the challenge owner). Innovators had between 9 and 12 months to develop and test their solutions.

For startups, scaleups and small-to-medium-sized businesses, the Digital Challenge unlocked opportunities to develop new skills, build new partnerships and develop products and services using advanced digital technologies, including cyber-physical systems and embedded systems. Innovators also benefited greatly from access to the network of Digital Innovation Hubs, which provided them with technical and business expertise and support, as well as networking opportunities within a unique European ecosystem.

The Digital Challenge has also encouraged European companies to be more competitive, unveiled market and collaboration opportunities with large organisations, and provided support for the economy through the Digital Innovation Hub ecosystem.