Blueprint for cities and regions as launch pads for digital transformation

Trento: Building on past achievements

Although Trento covers a relatively small area of c. 20,000 km2, with a total population of about 0.5 million inhabitants, its performance in innovation is remarkable. With 2.19% of its GDP invested in R&D, the city is for example well above the European average. Recently, Trento has even been ranked as the “world best practice” in the implementation of the concept of smart cities, beating cities such as …. Such outstanding track records would certainly not have been possible without the many reforms and programmes developed and implemented in Trento over the years. Clearly much work remains to be done. Yet, Trento’s leaders early efforts to trigger the digital transformation of their territory has certainly given the city a head start.

Contrarily to the situation in many other developed a vision that entails three key Italian cities, Trento’s leaders had dimensions: already started a strategic planning path 1. the issue of achieving environmental in 2000. Since then, they have and social sustainability; continuously refined their vision of what 2. the ambition of transforming itself “they want their city to become”. Starting in an “immaterial factory”; from what has already been put in place 3. the challenge ofdevelopingand and from what elements are relevant for promoting its territory and cultural making a city smart and digital, they have heritage. © Isaac74/Shutterstock.com Key initiatives

TasLab important political and economic TechPeaks decisions at local level, rather than TasLab is a cooperation cluster, which referring to the central Government. TechPeaks is a programme consisting of aims at creating an advanced innovation For instance, the Italian Unified Business six months free housing, food and an infrastructure capable of responding to Law (n. 6/1999) provides to the office in Trento, to individuals or teams present and future user needs, not only Autonomous Province of Trento a with “deep technical or design” expertise. from an ICT perspective but also from a specific package of funding opportunities At the end of the 6 months after being cultural and social point of view. The to attract business and investors to the coached and mentored by highly plan is to reduce the digital divide, and at region. Businesses investing in qualified entrepreneurs and investors, the same time experiment new ICT innovative R&D projects can benefit from participants submit three to five analyses solutions with citizens all over the grants ranging from 20% to 80% of the of their innovative ideas in areas such as territory. capital invested, with a maximum of 3 data collection and analysis, health and wellbeing or financial technology. The main activities of Taslab include: million euro per project. • The development of a user-centric Thanks to this investor- and business- environment where innovation is the friendly environment, economic way of being, thinking and evolving of decisions are made rapidly. Moreover, the citizens in Trentino the financial resources and wealth • The creation of an environment produced remain within the Trentino where the full innovation cycle, from region and are managed by the basic research to market products, provincial government. The website, gets naturally instantiated Investintrentino.it presents and promotes internationally the many • The conclusion of partnerships with opportunities for investors and partners. other territories in and in the A Telecom research and innovation world, built on top of the existing Open move laboratory national and international Telecom Italia, decided to set one of cooperation and partnerships of the OpenMove is a smart mobility solution in its R&I labs, Jol Skil, in Trento as a actors in Trentino Trento ideated by a local start-up, Lucian Srl, for optimizing public means of result of partnerships and agreements • The launch of awareness campaigns transport services. with Trento university. Jol skil lab on sustainability issues in the focuses on developing technologies Trentino region. The major step that brought to the for the automatic analysis of huge development of OpenMove implied the An institutional autonomy amounts of data. One of the major decision by the Trentino Alto initiatives taking place is the facilitating local access to finance region to make mobility data open to the CitySensing Project, which aims to citizenship. Through Open Move App, An element that plays as a driver in the automatically process anonymized citizens are given the possibility to pursuit of Trento digital strategy is the data flows from the Telecom Italia purchase ski lifts, parking, bus, and train presence of an easy access to financial network and from external sources tickets both for urban and extra-urban incentives mainly due to the institutional (big data) in order to identify routes; the validation is possible on- autonomy granted to the Autonomous evidence and trends in urban areas board by shooting the Q-R code. Province of Trento after the Second regarding the mobility of people, World. On the contrary to most of the tourist distribution in cities of art, cities in , Trento takes the most participation at events, etc.

Strategic Policy Forum on Digital Entrepreneurship www.digitallytransformyourregion.eu