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november 28, 2016 - European Space Agency

To catch an entrepreneur

Now is the time to start up. Businesses, providers and enablers are clamouring to get their start-up support messages out there.

Entrepreneurship is a healthy and growing force. And, with so much investment in this area, the conditions have never been riper to take your ideas further and into business. Our Nordic neighbours are rapidly becoming the embodiment of start-up spirit, providing not only the opportunities but the incentives as well. 

With countless innovative applications using space technology just waiting to happen, at what point do you capture the imagination of an entrepreneur? Luckily, encouraging space-connected entrepreneurship and innovation is exactly what we do.

Planting a seed

We recycle space knowhow and facilitate its use in new applications, bringing space back down to Earth. A focus is to develop and support initiatives that make space commercially interesting to explore and accessible to businesses and entrepreneurs.

App challenges, or hackathons, are one such initiative. These events are an excellent way to get to know about space. They also happen to be a perfect place to spark start-up ideas. This year we were at Junction, a two-day, round-the-clock design event for some 1400 hackers, creatives and developers to build an off-the-wall app. 

Held in Finland, Junction is Europe’s largest hackathon, attracting some of the brightest minds around. Naturally keen to see what they could do, ESA provided an Application Programming Interface (API) based on Earth observation satellite images to test skills. To make it even more interesting, the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute offered APIs based on the global navigation satellite system. We even offered incubation in our business centres as a prize for entrepreneurs wanting to do more with their space-connected ideas.

Developers flew in from more than 50 countries, and teamed up on the 350 applications developed during the two days and two nights.

For many at Junction it was the first time they’d ever had a chance to ‘play’ with space data. Participants were eager to learn new skills. More than expected picked up the space challenge and we were rewarded with some innovative applications. 


Winners of the ESA Arctic Special Prize were Austria’s HoloAstic. They combined transport logistics and navigation with virtual reality in a platform to raise efficiency, using Earth observation imagery to provide realtime route updates.

Second place went to Spain’s HeraSpace for developing an app for optimising ocean fishing standards and best practices. Combining Copernicus satellite data with actual fishing data, fishing routes and selection could eventually be drastically improved.

Particularly interesting were the features aimed at supporting sustainable exploitation of Arctic resources.

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