Social Space for Smart Regions

Petr Uhlir from WirelessInfo took part in 5G TECHRITORY - 3rd Baltic Sea Region 5G Ecosystem Forum
in Panel discussion with Topic: European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs)

Description: The need and current challenges of the digital transition and innovation. Expected role of European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs). European added value based on EDIH networking. Digital transformation -how to make it work for people, businesses and the environment. Sectors and industries that will benefit the most. 5G and its expected impact on digital innovation.

Moderator: Salvis Roga, MOB, Green-Tech Cluster / Kurzemes Business Incubator

Speakers:

• Anne-Marie Sassen, Deputy Head of Unit. DG CONNECT/A2, European Commission
• Āris Dzērvāns, Deputy State Secretary on Digital Transformation, Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development of the Republic of Latvia
• Muhammad Ali, Senior Scientist, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland
• Petr Uhlir, Senior Specialist, Wirelessinfo
• Iveta Strupkāja, Deputy Director of Export, Investment and Development Agency of Latvia

“Introduction”
Petr Uhlir from WRLS is a senior web developer with almost 20 years experience oriented on user experience (UX) and frontend architecture with skills in online-marketing and graphic design.

WirelessInfo is a Czech research and development association with focus on precision farming, GIS, remote sensing and generally ICT for agriculture. It cooperates with a number of Universities, Research Institutes, ICT companies, SMEs, agriculture organisations and farmers and is involved in several European projects under programme Horizon 2020. 

WirelessInfo is also cooperating with Baltic Open Solution Centre and Union “Farmers’ Parliament” (ZSA) in Latvia. WirelessInfo is also part of broader network Plan4all, within which it helps organize a series of so-called INSPIRE Hackathons, which are popular especially during the COVID-19 period.

“What EDIH is from WRLS perspective and what is our role in the EDIH’s  ecosystem in Europe”
DIH could be difined as a co-working space where common users, technologists, scientists, hackers, web developers share their ideas and transform them into real values. For this transformation they use a platform, a set of collaborative tools and applications, which can accelerate their development and promotion. One of our visions was that DIH should become a community portal and should aggregate information into a knowledge basement.

WRLS initially started operating as Living Lab (2005), which was later transformed into the first form of DiH. Currently, we are running 4 different Digital Innovation Hubs in the EU and also one in Africa – Nairobi. Hubs are running on our own platform, which was developed with the first hub agrihub.cz – it was our pilot project.

https://www.agrihub.cz
https://hub.plan4all.eu
https://hub.polirural.eu
https://www.smartafrihub.com
https://hub.sieusoil.eu

WirelessInfo is currently a member of the SmartAgriHubs project with more than 150 partners in the European agri-food sector, which aggregates and supports various innovation hubs. Our DIHs are also members of this vast ecosystem, and working within this network helps build capacity, promote and co-finance other DIHs.

“How to make EDIH work for PEOPLE, BUSINESS, ENVIRONMENT. Practical examples, real situation”

The purpose of the creation of a digital innovation hub was to design and develop an intelligent innovation center not only for agriculture. The platform is designed to create connections between people, businesses and other entities with the knowledge and technology that will help realize innovative projects and ideas.

One principle is to connect common users, in our case farmers and SMEs with developers and researchers. The second principle is to integrate new applications where users, developers and researchers can collaborate, create and test new solutions and experiments.

The platform solution is based on the use of Liferay Portal including integration of previously and new developed tools. eg: for map compositions, metadata, publishing geospatial data online and so more… Basic functionality allows registered users to manage content – like a blog, forum, wiki, science shop… science shop is pretty smart tool for students collaboration on the projects – it is for capacity building

We use this platform for startups support and hackathons. It allows us to offer them our infrastructure, support and promote projects and challenges, share data, results, content and webinars with other users, publish and access new applications and tools which are created in hackathons.

All this platform is designed to create a knowledge and information basement – it was one of our goals. Another goal was to become a community portal.

Benefits of DIHs:
user friendly platform, shared knowledge and information, support by specialists, collaboration, community, infrastructure, speed up in development

Who is the target group:
farmers, innovators, researchers, companies, startup companies, all who wants to do a new and innovative things