A central challenge is to bring people together to create innovations. Traditionally this works only with a high density of experts, entrepreneurs, and customers, e.g. silicon valley. In distributed settings on a European scale, this does not work, despite the existence of matching platforms.

We take a different approach that is inspired by matching people in online dating. Individuals and companies often don't know what they can offer or what they need. Hence we suggest a more holistic approach and envision an intelligent matching platform based on questions about skills, interest, values, approaches, existing collaborations and digital artifacts (code, images, algorithms).

We ran a workshop to understand what are the right questions, what are artifacts telling, and what are good indicators for potential collaborations. We also ran a workshop to identify AI techniques to perform the matches and to identify the system architecture of the platform.