The event is to be held on the eve of the 2016 General Assembly of the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC).
This meeting is meant to become a regular forum for experts involved in smart city lighthouse projects and supporting actions to pull together talent, share experience, knowledge and insight - and act as a community.
The projects at issue currently involve 21 so-called ‘lighthouse’ cities and their follower cities. The EU has committed more than €200 million in funding to support the development, roll-out and replication of demonstration projects, and the partners are designing business models to secure investment over the lifetime of the projects – and beyond.
Smart city projects all over Europe still tend to suffer from being developed in isolation, with ideas, applications and services often based on proprietary solutions. This keeps prices prohibitively high, which discourages investment and excludes smaller ventures from the smart city market. By replicating ideas and practices already tested or piloted in pioneering smart cities, several more cities in Europe stand to benefit from the EU’s initial funding.
The participants are determined to turn the tide. By improving cross-project coordination and defining common ground on how best to replicate and scale successful initiatives, they aim to create a highly efficient management framework and help innovators and smart city leaders with a vision to guide an increasing number of cities “into the future”.
The event is organised by EUROCITIES – acting in its capacity as a partner in the European Commission-funded CITYkeys project - and Fraunhofer in cooperation with the Commission’s Directorates-General for Mobility and Transport (DG MOVE), Communications Networks, Content & Technology (DG CONNECT) and Energy (ENER).
23 May 2016