The joint Future City Challenge project of IBM, Digita and Etteplan is starting – assemble your team for a Finland-wide IoT innovation competition

IBM, Digita and Etteplan are jointly organising Finland’s first nationwide innovation competition, the Future City Challenge, with the aim of designing new solutions and applications to make the everyday lives of city-dwellers easier. The cities participating in the competition are Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa, Oulu, Jyväskylä and Tampere. Future City Challenge will begin on 3 December 2017 and end on 31 January 2018. 

The competition is aimed at companies, startups and students interested in urban challenges. Instead of technology-oriented problems, each participating city will announce a number of real-life challenges for the application developers to solve. The best and most viable ideas will be rewarded, and the competition offers the possibility to give new business models a flying start. The competition will be launched at a kick-off event in Espoo on Wednesday, 22 November.

The jury of the Future City Challenge consists of IoT services Director Ari Kuukka of Digita, Director of Economic Development Tuula Antola of the City of Espoo, Technology Director Jaakko Ala-Paavola of Etteplan, Cloud Specialist Arto Ahde of IBM, CEO Rasmus Roiha of the Finnish Software Industry and Entrepreneur Association and Director of Economic Development Marja-Leena Rinkineva of the City of Helsinki.

”The competition fits Espoo’s profile as an innovative city that promotes vitality and networked activities. The needs and wishes of residents are constantly becoming more diverse, and the city should be able to respond to them with resident-oriented and high-quality services. From the Future City Challenge, we hope to obtain digital solutions for our growing service needs”, says Tuula Antola , Director of Economic Development, City of Espoo.

The participants in the competition will be given access to the cities’ open data with the help of Etteplan’s leading IoT expert organisation. Digita will provide access to its nationwide IoT network based on LoRaWAN technology, while IBM will contribute the Bluemix innovation platform containing, for example, IBM Watson AI capabilities and an IoT platform. In addition, the competition organisers will offer the latest tools, required resources and project team support for the contestants.