Open innovation in
academia-society cooperation

As the Ukrainian war is unfolding, European Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and their research and professional staff came up with a range of inclusive and innovative ideas to provide humanitarian assistance and help preserve Ukraine’s cultural heritage. Lessons learnt by the efforts of supporting Ukrainian cultural heritage will be an added value to the cultural heritage community of experts as well as citizens, as more emphasis is given to participatory and citizen driven action.

As mentioned in Unit 1, open innovation is about involving more public and private actors, entities, researchers and citizens in the process to generate innovative ideas and solutions. This spirit of inclusiveness and shared responsibility in tackling social issues and challenges can function as a catalyst in times of crisis and humanitarian aid. In the sub-units below, you will be introduced to outstanding initiatives undertaken by academia that combine open innovation with digital technologies and citizens’ engagement.

The 4CH initiative

One of the most rapid and effective initiatives that have been carried out to safeguard the Ukrainian cultural heritage is the 4CH - SUM (Save Ukrainian Monuments) initiative organised by the consortium of the 4CH project. The 4CH project aims to establish a European Competence Centre for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage which started its function in January 2021.

In order to provide immediate assistance to the Ukrainian cultural sector, the 4CH consortium has accepted datasets from researchers, cultural heritage institutions, museums, archives, libraries, companies and individuals in Ukraine to place them in a secure digital repository in Europe. As soon as the conflict de-escalates, all datasets will be returned to the legitimate owners.


4CH project, Save the Ukraine Monuments webpage

Integral part of this initiative are several European research centres and universities, such as the PIN research agency of the University of Florence, the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics, the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Luxembourg, the University of Tours and the University of Bologna.

The wide network of actors involved in this initiative, either important European institutions or researchers and people working on the Ukrainian cultural sector has guaranteed the successful and safe storage of more than 50 Terabytes of data, despite difficulties in gathering these resources in war ravaged territories.

Learn more on the 4CH initiative here.

SUCHO

Another outstanding, by its dynamic work and impressive number of people involved, initiative is Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO). The team comprises a group of more than 1,300 cultural heritage professionals including librarians, archivists, researchers, and programmers, that come (virtually) together to archive “at-risk [web]sites, digital content, and data in Ukrainian cultural heritage institutions while the country is under attack,” according to the group’s website.

Volunteers can sign up to help digitise important, historic, or otherwise unique documents, photos, and websites for posterity. Far from being merely an initiative that considers web archiving as another project for the research community to work on, what triggers SUCHO’s volunteers action is clearly stated by one of its founders, Quinn Dombrowski:

“But just in case these backups will be needed, we want to be able to put the files back where they belong: into the hands of Ukrainian librarians, archivists and curators.” (Volunteers Unite to Archive Ukrainian Cultural Heritage, March 8, 2022)

The coordinating team behind this initiative include Quinn Dombrowski, HE staff from Stanford University, Anna E. Kijas from Tufts University and Sebastian Majstorovic, a digital historian working in the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage. Thanks to their advanced IT facilities and specialised staff, HEIs can play an important role in promoting the storage and preservation of cultural heritage assets, thus guaranteeing a safe place for them in times of crisis.

Furthermore, what makes the SUCHO initiative even more interesting and inclusive is that it provides the necessary resources, tools and tutorials to better guide volunteers in this cultural heritage protection journey, thus eliminating any distinctions between experienced and newcomers in the field of digitally enhanced culture preservation.


SUCHO poster

As it is stated by Dan Cohen, dean of libraries and vice provost for information collaboration at Northeastern University:

“There’s a long history of these digital libraries that synthesize, preserve, and make widely available the records of regions, states, nations, people, and communities—SUCHO is just the latest version”, (Callahan, March 2022)

What makes SUCHO a successful initiative is its academia-society cooperation approach that facilitated its diffusion in just a short amount of time, covering volunteers from all over the world. SUCHO is also a great example of academia opening up to society and working together for a common cause which in this case is the protection of Ukrainian cultural heritage that is under threat.

A dedicated webinar to further disseminate and propagate the work of the SUCHO initiative, as well as to launch its own initiative Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage in Digital (SaveUCHdigital), was organised by the Digital Competence Framework for Ukrainian teachers and other citizens (dComFra) project. The webinar was a trigger of discussion among cultural heritage professionals and researchers, mostly associated with academia environments in Ukraine and abroad, who shared their experiences in cultural heritage preservation through digital technologies.

You can follow the webinar’s discussion by clicking here.

Hackathon4Ukraine

Another great initiative organised by programmers from the Warsaw University of Technology and the Imperial College London, was the hackathon event “Hackathon4Ukraine”. The hackathon took place on March 19, 2022, and called on all hackathon enthusiasts to come up with ideas to be transformed into apps under the scope to help and support Ukrainian people.

The #Hackathon4Ukraine initiative gathered a total of 19 teams who cooperated closely to develop the best digital solutions. You can find records of the teams’ work on the GitHub repository. The three winning teams were:

  • “Search4Ukraine”, an app that simplifies internet search in the Ukrainian language for citizens in foreign countries
  • “Damage Map”, an app that allows residents who remained in Ukraine to report damage to public buildings and apartment blocks
  • “Disinfo Fighter”, an app that serves as a propaganda filter and flags social media posts with a high probability to be fake news.

Hackathon4Ukraine winning teams

Working with data, the participating teams concentrated on developing app solutions that speak directly to the current humanitarian needs of the population, as well as taking into consideration the not always safe and innocent world of internet and social media where fake news and misinformation can rather exacerbate tensions in already critical situations.

The #EUSpace4Ukraine initiative


When people think of space, and especially space data, they can rarely connect them with any humanitarian aid initiative. In reality, space data, as all types of data, can be used to generate technological tools and solutions even for humanitarian purposes. The EUSPA initiative “EUSpace4Ukraine” is proof of the above!

Specifically, the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA) launched an online platform through which it collects applications and solutions that make use of data provided by Galileo and Copernicus to support NGOs and volunteers who are providing humanitarian aid to Ukrainians. Galileo is the system that provides positioning and navigation services, while Copernicus supplies Earth observation data and information.


EUSpace4Ukraine initiative webpage

EUSPA has identified the proposed solutions in five categories, namely:

  • Unmanned solution for transport and delivery of goods
  • Safety and rescue
  • Integration in a new country
  • Applications to help understanding and inventorying the damages in Ukraine territories
  • Safe, timely and accurate Navigation for Population migration

You can find out more about the innovative solutions gathered so far by clicking here.

To further connect NGOs and helpers of the humanitarian aid community with innovators, the EUSpace4Ukraine initiative will run a hackathon from the 29th of June to the 1st of July. The aim of the #EUSpace4Ukraine hackathon will be to develop through the use of space data innovative solutions that will enhance humanitarian assistance to people affected by the crisis.

To communicate the launch of the initiative and spread the call for the upcoming hackathon event, EUSPA organised a webinar on the 12th of April (information).

In this special hackathon, Web2Learn has submitted 2 hackathon Challenges, both developed in the context of the EU funded HEIDI project. The first one is about Cultural Heritage under threat that seeks to help protect Ukrainian cultural heritage through citizen led earth observations that will gather useful information on the state of cultural monuments and assets on the ground.

The second Challenge focuses on Earth observations for environmental monitoring. This hackathon Challenge brings emphasis on the environmental degradation and destruction carried out by armed conflicts, leading to a significant deterioration of the conditions of the natural heritage and the human communities directly connected with it. This Challenge will make use of data on pollution provided by sensors and online systems in Ukraine to help spot and monitor environmental degradation on the ground.

You can find more on these 2 Challenges, as well as be part in them, here.

Finally, it is worth noting that the #EUSpace4Ukraine initiative is a great example of how the EU Space innovation community can actively engage in humanitarian support in times of crisis with the direct involvement of innovators and humanitarian organisations, as well as individuals coming from all across Europe. Besides, open innovation cannot flourish in an extremely specialised environment in which new ideas and interactions with the social world don’t take place, especially regarding humanitarian support. This is why important agencies, like EUSPA, wish to highlight the importance of open innovation and invite everyone who wants to develop new ideas and solutions to take part in its special hackathon organised for a special cause.