The Navy Hackathon 2 is an open innovation event designed to unite Navy personnel and civilian professionals for collaborative problem-solving in the maritime ecosystem. This two-day event encourages participants to create innovative solutions to real-world challenges faced by the Belgian Navy.

Participants will engage in hands-on activities to devise solutions in key challenge areas: Technology, Ecosystem, and Procurement. Each challenge is based on issues identified through collaboration with Belgian Defence.

• Requirements Clarity - Belgian Defence procurement faces multiple issues: fully capturing and accurately translating rapidly evolving needs into technical specifications can be challenging. Frequent rotation of staff means knowledge of the procurement process and tools is often lost. As a result, the procurement process is slow, labour-intensive, and sometimes leads to less-than-optimal products and services being procured.
• Redefining Relationship with Ecosystem - Across the maritime community — academia, industry, and Defence — there is strong willingness to collaborate on innovation projects, but the existing collaboration channels are fragmented. Multiple focused networks exist (e.g. industry-only like Alfaport Voka, academia–industry like De Blauwe Cluster, etc.) and some of these networks overlap and collaborate. However, there is no shared approach to bringing together the technology push from industry and academia with the pull from Defence or industry to solve immediate issues identified by the Navy or by the community.
• Resilient Data - The Belgian North Sea is monitored by a wide range of public and private actors — Navy, MIK, police, customs, port authorities, offshore operators, wind-farm owners, researchers, and more. Each generates potentially valuable data, yet data remain fragmented across different systems, owners, formats, and legal frameworks.
  This fragmentation slows down the ability to detect, interpret, and react to critical incidents — from environmental violations to smuggling, intrusions, sabotage attempts, or underwater threats. Workload at the MIK continues to grow, while underwater sensing capacity still lags behind surface and aerial domains.
  An additional barrier to effective use of the available data is the rapidly (compared to the early days of MIK) shifting geopolitical context and potential new tasks for the Belgian Navy, which complicates maintaining SOPs / written guidelines on reacting to certain threats.

The event invites a diverse range of participants, including maritime professionals, Navy personnel, students, researchers, and technology innovators. Through ideation workshops and expert insights, attendees will prototype their ideas and present to a jury.

More information about the event and participation can be found at inno4def.be.