Viable Cities Mikael Edelstam attended the annual meeting of the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (EIP SCC) in Sofia in June 2018. Here he reports from the meeting.
Several hundred people gathered in Sofia for a two-day review of the EIP SCC, now in its eighth year of operation. Many key people from cities, industry and the EU administration were present, which also provided opportunities for informal meetings in the corridors. During the presentations and discussions, several clear trends emerged
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Increased focus on investment and financing issues around smart sustainable cities to increase capital flows to smart sustainable cities.
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Searching for broader models to understand different types of value creation as cities transition to sustainability
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Efforts to support match-making between cities and investors
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An increasingly strong focus on the results and lessons learned from the Lightouse projects in order to scale them up in a way that leads to a better functioning market for different types of solutions and investments for smart sustainable cities.
A document outlining a development plan for the future. Towards a joint investment program for European smart cities - was available. It gives a picture of the European discussion on smart cities and investment issues. For Viable Cities, it provides interesting input for future idea development and initiatives.Since the European Commission is also pushing to create a strong pipeline of investable projects, there is great interest in Swedish such opportunities, and officials responsible for the EIP SCC I met would like to see increased involvement from Swedish cities. Much more information can be found via the EIP SCC website where you can find various working groups, reports, links to the Lighthouse projects etc. Finally, I would like to provide two interesting links to things I myself helped to initiate during the time I worked with the EIP SCC, a collection of examples of investment and business models, and a website with EU-based funding opportunities for projects etc. built by the EIP SCC in collaboration with the Covenant of Mayors. In summary, EIP SCC is clearly worth monitoring in the future for Viable Cities, and is a good source of information and cooperation for Swedish actors in various sectors.
Links EIP SCC website The website presents the different components of the initiative.Examples of investment and business models.The quality and level of detail varies, but this is the compilation that is currently being built up at EU level.Funding opportunities collection page on the EIP SCC websiteThiswebpage presents different types of EU funding opportunities related to smart cities.Towards a joint investment programme for European smart citiesA reporton how Europe can develop better collaboration on financing smart sustainable cities in the future.
About the writer: Mikael Edelstam is the founder and CEO of the company Miljöstrategi, a member of Viable Cities. He is also project manager for the strategic project on Internationalization and has the role of development manager in the strategic project on Knowledge Sharing. Within EIP SCC he worked as an expert for the Action Cluster on Financing and business models.
