Now that the Galileo and Copernicus satellite programmes are entering their operational phase, innovation possibilities in the field of satellite data driven applications are getting wider. Thanks to these two massive investments in technology, European and worldwide companies are starting to benefit from increasing, regular and cheaper (not to say free of charge) data flows, which could lead to the development of new and innovative applications and services in an incredibly vast range of markets, including non-space markets. The exploitation of satellite data, as well as open data (from public authorities in particular) has the potential to generate a lot of innovative solutions. In this context the FabSpace 2.0 project aims at putting the Universities at the front line for the take-off of Earth Observation based applications in Europe and worldwide. This can be pursued by hosting and animating open places dedicated to space and geodata-driven innovation where young developers from the civil society, experienced developers from industry or academic and research institutes, public administrations as well as civil organizations can meet, work together and co-create new tools and business models. They can create an ecosystem fitting (and developed according to) the particularities of geodata-driven innovation, in particular for the emergence of Space data downstream services. In this innovative environment, innovation is driven by the needs of users through the involvement of civil society in the innovation process and in the definition of new challenges. Moreover the actors making innovation will be anonymous civilians (students and researchers in particular) and will thus be at the same time developers and end-users of the applications they develop. That is why the FabSpace 2.0 project is expected to improve the capacity of Universities to generate more innovations and generate positive socio-economic impacts. All partner universities are centers of excellence in research in the field of geomatics and space based information. They are not only offering a highly-qualified human capital likely to generate innovation, but also providing open access to data generated within previous research works. Thus the FabSpace 2.0 project can be a particularly relevant opportunity for research teams to make a step forward towards Science 2.0
