Calling entrepreneurs, start-ups and creative developers with an interest in culture, open data or the Nordic.

The cultural hackathon, Hack4DK returns September 23^rd to 25^th, and this year we add yet another layer to the traditional hackathon. In addition to Hack4DK, we offer the opportunity of competing in our Nordic competition track, Hack4Norden.

The winning group wins the price of a trip to Slush Festival in Helsinki this November, where they will pitch their project to investors and engineers from 100 countries, competing for a prize worth of NOK 250.000:

• The participants will be contacted by Nordic Innovation and be introduced to the coaches who will start preparing them for their pitch.
• The coaches will lead the prepping process up till the day of the pitch 1 December 2017, including a whole day workshop on 30 November 2017.
• The national teams will be able to reimburse costs of maximum NOK 25.000 related to Slush.
• The Nordic winner will receive tailored business support services after Slush Festival, depending on their needs (marketing support, legal advice, help with patent applications and so on).

All it takes to enter the Hack4Norden competition is to work within the sphere of Nordic data or –culture. The participation criteria for the Nordic competition are:

• The proposed service or solution should have a clearly defined value proposition (including a specified target group/customer/user), explaining how the service/solution solves a specific problem, improves a situation and/or delivers specific benefits to users AND
• The team consists of people from at least two Nordic countries (not nationalities) AND/OR
• The team uses datasets from at least two Nordic countries AND/OR
• The team aims to solve challenges related to a Nordic theme/priority

To see a selection and read more about the Nordic data sets click here: http://bit.ly/2cDIIn7

The jury consists of:

Eline Wernberg Sigfusson, Nordisk Kulturfond
Rolf Källman, Digisam
Laila Pawlak, Dare2

Projects submitted to the Hack4Norden challenge will be judged against the following criteria:

• Innovation and creativity: new products, technologies, services or improvements to existing solutions, combining or implementing these in new ways, and creative use (e.g. visualizations, 3D-printing, storytelling and more)
• Nordic datasets: number of datasets from different Nordic countries employed in the service/solution
• Business/commercial potential
• Relevance for Nordic themes (see http://www.norden.org for inspiration, one example is Nordic Nutrition and New Nordic Food)
• Nordic-wide issues or challenges: services/solutions that could easily be exported to other Nordic countries
• There will be a special reward for creative ideas or solutions aimed at combining data from and encouraging collaboration between actors in the Nordic ‘digital ecosystem’:

1. Citizens/users (e.g. crowdsourcing data / ‘citizen science’)
2. Private sector (start-ups, SMEs, large corporations)
3. Public sector (ministries, directorates etc.)

To experience the ingenuity and collaboration of technology, creativity and culture follow our Facebook site Hack4DK.

To see the official Hack4Norden announcement click here.