Innovation Partnership
The European Approach to Smart Cities
With high-level political support, the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities hold their General Assembly to drive the European Smart City Agenda.
The European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities is holding their 2015 General Assembly at the Metropolitan Solutions, and we couldn’t be more excited.
What is the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities – in short: EIP – you might ask? The EIP is the European Union’s vehicle to try and harmonize and integrate all the different Smart City solutions that are currently developed in the Union, often with EU funding.
But to come up with a reliable way to implement Smart Cities on scale, individual test-cases and prototypes need to be scalable and replicable. That’s where EIP steps in and provides a marketplace for urban administrators and solution providers to find each other.
Political Support for the City of the Future
What’s also clear is that there’s hefty political support behind the notion of the Smart City. With both Violeta Bulc, Commissioner for Transportation, and Günther Öttinger, head of the Economy and Digital Society agenda at the European Commission present, the EIP General Assembly aims to take stock of the recent developments in Europe and provide a path for Smart City roll-outs.
With a unique European look at Smart Cities, and especially their relation to their citizens, EIP asks how Smart Cities can increase citizen involvement and create the right solutions to meet citizens’ needs.
With Action Clusters working on Smart City issues from Business Models, Integrated Infrastructure, Processes and Open Data, Sustainable Urban Mobility, Sustainable Districts and Built Environment, the already mentioned Citizen Focus, the EIP is the most comprehensive framework for Smart City innovation with a wide level of stakeholders.