Twelve ITEA projects showcased at Smart City Expo World Congress

Bringing together Smart City Challenges and Smart City solutions

ITEA projects are based on customers’ needs and focus on both societal and business impact. That is nothing new. So it can also be regarded as a logical step for ITEA to reach out beyond its own Community to a customer-oriented fair and engage with a wider audience, including potential customers and end users, to showcase the results of its projects. The Smart City Expo World Congress that took place from 19 to 21 November in Barcelona provided the ideal opportunity for ITEA to connect with a good number of the almost 25,000 visitors and to bring Smart City challenges and solutions together.

Looking back …

We look back at a successful new experience, with of course some valuable lessons learnt. The evaluation (50% response) score of 3.8 out of 5 shows that this feeling was shared by the attending project partners. With the condition that the topic of the fair is relevant to the project, the respondents commonly advise other projects to take part in similar events, as it can lead to relevant new business opportunities. Especially the organised Innovation Discoveries (tailored guided tours for customers) led to highly qualified booth visitors including 20 city representatives from Almere to Istanbul and from Oulu to Grenoble, which was highly appreciated by the projects. Nearly all respondents that have taken part in previous ITEA Co-summits indicate that exhibiting at SCEWC was better for the project and 67% would participate again, while others are “not sure yet” as a couple projects have come to an end.

The interactive Smart City Innovation side event organised by ITEA gave the floor to a set of ITEA projects to present themselves and learn from the audience. Using an interactive tool, the audience provided views and opinions during the presentations, giving the projects a better insight into priorities and ideas of the audience. For example, safety is a main priority in all Smart City challenges, and although autonomous driving is already possible now for some traffic situations, 60% of the audience will only be ready in 10 years to buy a car with autonomous driving capabilities. It was evident that trust is an issue that needs to be resolved too.

In the words of CitiSim project leader Carlos Jiménez: “In my opinion, participating in this edition of the Smart City Expo World Congress was a very successful experience for the CitiSim project. In that sense, being part of the ITEA Community together with other innovative projects had a very positive impact in terms of increasing the interest of the audience towards our project and attracting more visitors. In the same way, the support provided as well as the promotion opportunities managed by ITEA resulted not only in great possibilities for disseminating the outcomes of the project but also in interesting contacts for partners of the CitiSim project. This event was also a great chance for us to test and show some of our real-world demonstrators and update our knowledge about real market demands.”

Solving Smart City challenges

The ITEA pavilion contained 12 project booths, each providing a reply to many Smart City challenges, like:

• You want your city to be safe?
• You want to enhance the mobility in your city?
• You need to enhance the e-Democracy in your city?
• You want to fight against the information silos?
• You want to deploy connected services in your city?
• You want to protect the commercial activity in the centre of your city?
• You need to master indoor as well as outdoor air quality?
• You need to optimise the energy consumption in your industrial buildings?

...and many more.

The projects that joined the ITEA booth were:

…and looking forward: Cyber Security and Cloud Expo, 1-2 July 2020, Amsterdam

Encouraged by the positive feedback we feel to have chosen the right path for our event strategy and we are now preparing our participation in the next costumer-oriented fair. Together with a selected set of related projects ITEA will participate in the Cyber Security and Cloud Expo that will take place on 1 and 2 July 2020 in Amsterdam. If you / your ITEA project would be interested in participating, don’t hesitate to contact the ITEA Office. We would be happy to welcome your project in our booth. We hope to see you there!