Smart City: EUREKA's Inter-Cluster in the lead
During the EUREKA Swiss Innovation event held today in Basel, the EUREKA Clusters’ Chairpersons, the Swiss EUREKA Chairman Bruno Moor and the Head of the EUREKA Secretariat Pedro de Sampaio Nunes, have signed a memorandum of understanding on Smart City.
All parties are committed to encourage and facilitate collaborative innovative proposals addressing smart cities. The InterCluster Committee estimates that such projects could represent up to 2 B€ by 2020 and urges EUREKA Members States to provide adequate support.
EUREKA Clusters are the entry point for Smart City projects driven by industry, focused on innovative systems, solutions and services.
From letft to right: Denis Rousset, CATRENE, Rudolf Haggenmüller, ITEA 3 Chairman, Nobert Lehner, CATRENE Vice-chairman, Jacques Magen,CELTIC-Plus Chairman, Xavier Chazelle, ACQUEAU Chairman, Gabriel Marquette, EUROGIA2020 General manager, Jean-Luc Maté, InterCluster Chairman and EURIPIDES2, Chairman, Bruno Moor, Swiss EUREKA Chairman, Pedro Nunes, Head of the EUREKA Secretariat et Rémy Renaudin, EURIPIDES2.
Jean Luc Maté, InterCluster Committee Chairman stated: “Thanks to this partnership, we aim to increase interest and project participation in smart cities. It is important to highlight the fact that there has been a lot of interest from companies to use the EUREKA platform for Smart City projects since a number of years. This agreement will encourage more the industry to enable business models and empower people”.
Cities and communities around the world face difficult challenges. 50% of the world’s population lives in urban areas. This is expected to rise to 60% before 2025. As a result, the pressure on city infrastructures will require enormous redesign and capital expenditure.
These issues, and others, can be mitigated through the adoption of scalable solutions from leading technologies to increase efficiencies, reduce costs, and enhance quality of life. Cities that take this approach are commonly referred to as a Smart City. Frost & Sullivan estimates a world market potential of $1.5 trillion in 2020 for the Smart City market in segments of energy and water, transportation, mobility, healthcare, building, infrastructure and governance.
EUREKA, the intergovernmental initiative has been at the forefront of innovative products, processes and services for 30 years with a unique and constant “industrial bottom up” approach. It has contributed to Smart City applications and solutions with a number of projects. Through these projects, EUREKA has tried to address the technological challenges aimed at adopting Smart City solutions and proposes innovations to be used across city sectors.
The major part of most Smart City projects are initiated by industry led consortia gathering large companies and SMEs, typical of EUREKA projects and in particular Clusters.
Since 2010, more than 100 projects contributing to smart cities and representing B€ 1.1 of public and private funding have been labelled by EUREKA. ITEA 3 and Celtic-Plus have been the pioneers in involving cities and other public institutions in their projects. City design, buildings and life simulation are taken into account in this InterCluster analysis under Smart City planning.
However, the majority of projects are classified under Smart City management in EUREKA (Clusters, Eurostars and individual projects). This item is addressing a vast domain which embraces network management, energy production, security, health, mobility, economic development and administration.
Although the implementation of Smart City projects largely depends on governments (national, regional, local) initiatives, the challenge for industry is to come up with affordable, friendly solutions, which above all meet the needs of citizens, who have to take over the ownership.
A smart sustainable city uses innovative technologies to provide a better quality of life to its citizens, efficient and friendly services and sustainable development. Cities can be seen as dynamic and complex systems that evolve in time and space, following trajectories that are difficult to predict.
More information on www.eurekanetwork.org/smart-cities.
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About Clusters: EUREKA Clusters are strategic initiatives proposed and led by industry. Clusters facilitate innovative projects involving a strong industrial participation spanning large companies and SMEs as well as research institutions and public organisations.
About EUREKA: EUREKA is an intergovernmental organisation for market-driven industrial R&D. It is a decentralised network facilitating the coordination of national funding on innovation aiming to boost the productivity & competitiveness of European industries. The network integrates over 40 pan-European economies, but also includes Israel, South Africa, South Korea, and Canada. Following a bottom-up approach with projects being in any technological area with a civilian purpose, EUREKA has been the driving force of innovation in Europe for 30 years.