The 5G Catalunya pilot project is taking part as a challenger in the fifth Innova&acción Business Challenge hackathon, organised by Innova&acción, of the Polytechnic Foundation of the Valencian Community. The event is a 24-hour marathon of open innovation that will take place this Friday and Saturday in Valencia.
Participants include 80 individuals, previously selected and organised in high-performance work teams, who will spend a full day proposing innovative, viable, real and easy-to-apply solutions to the challenges put forth by challenger organisations, the 5G Catalunya pilot project among them.
Through open innovation, 5G Catalunya aims to help to position our country as a benchmark in 5G deployment, which constitutes a decisive impulse towards a digital society, as it will accelerate the digital transformation of companies and cities. To achieve this, participating in co-creating spaces such as this one, where we connect with the brightest talent and restless new generations eager to improve our societies through technology, is fundamental.
Indeed, the challenge that 5G Catalunya presents in this hackathon is related to the project’s mission and to this concern that characterises many participants in these types of events: improving people’s lives through technology.
To define this challenge, the project partners met in early September for an internal workshop where they discussed the future challenges of 5G and, above all, some of the applications that can be developed to improve the quality of life of our society. In fact, these applications are seen as new use cases for future development to experiment around the features and possibilities of the new network and demonstrate the advantages it can bring.
Challenges in life, 5G solutions
The workshop, entitled “Challenges in life, 5G solutions”, involved brainstorming several challenges and later, with the help of Innova&acción, selecting and defining the challenge that will ultimately be presented this Friday to the teams assigned to 5G Catalunya at the hackathon.
Javier Campos, CTO and CIO of Aumenta Solutions, and Alejandro Gonzalez Madueño, IT Architect Consultant of Lenovo, will represent 5G Catalunya at the Innova&acción Business Challenge hackathon, and will explain in detail the challenge that the teams must solve during the 24 hours of open innovation.
“It is my belief that the future is not what will happen, but what the new generations will do, so I am looking forward to hearing the ideas they will propose at the hackathon,” explained Campos.
Ana Varela, leader of the 5G Catalunya pilot project and Open Innovation Programme Manager at Cellnex Telecom, stressed that “the 5G revolution is firmly committed to open innovation, because it is here to transform our lives and change the way we communicate, and the collaboration of new talent is therefore essential to maximise the benefits of this technology and drive this transformation”.
In the words of Josep Martí, CEO of Nearby Computing, the event is also “an opportunity to disseminate the benefits that 5G can bring to the quality of life of our societies”. Leo Aranda, Nae project manager, insisted on this idea: “We encourage the hackathon participants assigned to our challenge to continue to be part of the 5G ecosystem after the event. As stated in our slogan, 5G is an impulse towards a digital society”.
