ActInSpace 2018 goes international
Friday 25 and Saturday 26 May, CNES, ESA and ESA BIC Sud France organized the third edition of ActInSpace®, the top international hackathon-style competition devoted to space applications.
Held concurrently in some 35 countries and 70 cities on all five continents, this competition open to entrants from all horizons aims to develop entrepreneurship and forge ties between space stakeholders and citizens by setting challenges for teams to solve based on patents, software, data or space infrastructures.
This third edition proved an enormous success, attracting more than 3,300 entrants. On the day of the event, 2,200 took part in more than 550 teams working for 24 hours on one of the 80 challenges set.
Participants came from all horizons and showed themselves equal to the task of creating a start-up around space technologies. Almost half were from outside the field of engineering sciences, including students of literature, human sciences and even fine arts. This range of entrants was reflected in the diversity of projects presented.
Like the previous ActInSpace®, students made up the bulk of participants, accounting for 75% of entrants, with the remaining 30% composed of 20% employees and entrepreneurs and 2,6% job seekers.
It is also worth noting that 23% of entrants this year are women.
Business coaches and space experts were there to assist the participants at each venue, some 500 professionals remaining on hand for teams during the 24-hour event.
The big new feature this year was an online support platform for the teams to get answers to their questions about space technologies.
More than 2,100 questions were fielded by the 110 experts connected to the platform, thus ensuring that all entrants, even those from countries where a space industry is not yet well developed, benefited from the same level of technical support.
Another novelty was the challenges asking teams to imagine themselves as new space entrants (40%) and devise ways for space to serve humankind (25%).
The international final will be on Wednesday 27 June at the Toulouse Space Show, where each country will be represented by its best team. The team presenting the most promising project will win the Grand Prix ActInSpace, and numerous other prizes will be awarded.
The international final will be followed by the prize-giving (or prize giving) ceremony in the presence of all the international partners who have supported the event: Airbus, Qwant, Invivo, AirZeroG, GSA, CLS, EBAN, FabSpace, Invest In Toulouse and Toulouse Business School.
About ESA BIC Sud France
Set up at the Paris Air Show in 2013, the ESA Business Incubation Centre (BIC) Sud France is the European Space Agency’s first such centre in France.
There are 17 others in Europe. It is coordinated by the Aerospace Valley competitiveness cluster in conjunction with CNES and the SAFE cluster. It comprises six incubators in the Nouvelle Aquitaine, Occitanie and Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur regions: Technopole Bordeaux Technowest, ESTIA Entreprendre, Théogone, the Midi-Pyrenees and PACA-Est incubators and the Montpellier BIC.
Since its inception, ESA BIC Sud France has incubated 58 start-ups. Learn more here. Read news from ESA BIC Sud France here.
About ESA and its Technology Transfer and Business Incubation Programme
ESA with its Technology Transfer and Business incubation Programme Office is an honored partner of CNES for the ActInSpace activity.
ESA BIC Sud France is part of the ESA Business Incubation Centres´ network of 18 centres in 15 European countries, operated under ESA´s Technology Transfer Programme and Business Incubation Office.
The ESA BIC network, part of the ESA space solutions, is the world’s largest ecosystem for space related entrepreneurship and supports 160 companies per year.
More than 600 new start-ups have so far been fostered. Learn more about the ESA Business Incubation Centres and how to join here.
CNES Press Release
The above text is based on the CNES Press Release PR076-2018 of 30 May 2018.
