Innovation initiatives in Catalonia

Participation in initiatives to encourage technological development in Catalonia

Since its creation in 2003, the i2CAT Foundation has had as one of its strategic goals the cooperation with different organisations of the Generalitat de Catalunya (the Catalan Government) and other local entities in order to encourage research and innovation activities and initiatives.

The purpose of this cooperation is to create strategies to encourage innovation in ICT and Internet technologies with the aim of promoting the competitiveness of Catalan business and industry by means of applied innovation.

In this regard, the most relevant actions and activities carried out in 2013 were the following:

BarcelonaLab

BarcelonaLab is an initiative of the Culture Institute of Barcelona (ICUB), supported by the i2CAT Foundation, designed to promote and catalyse the culture of innovation in the city of Barcelona through the creation of a real ecosystem for collaborative and open innovation all around the city and open to the all citizens.

BarcelonaLab includes and receives support from public institutions, companies, research centres, universities, associations and communities, based on the quadruple helix, where creativity, knowledge and culture are the key elements for social and economic development. This innovation ecosystem allows and catalyses the necessary synergies between the different agents to develop and advance their research and innovation projects. BarcelonaLab is at the same time the space for co-creation for solving those challenges that its community agents propose.

During the 2013, and under the umbrella of the BarcelonaLab, several different projects are running, all with a common goal: challenges opened to the city to help them with their needs, experiments with real scenarios, and at the same time enabling new real scenarios.

FI-Content Open Call for SMEs

i2CAT is participating in the FI-Content-2 project, a European project with the purpose of fostering innovation at the crossroads of content creation, multimedia, networks and creativity. Within the framework of this project, i2CAT organised an open session for Catalan SMEs and developers interested in the Future Internet open platforms provided by FI-Content-2, the areas of Social Connected TV, Smart City Services, and Pervasive Games. SMEs received detailed information on the FI-Content Open Call, open until the 8th of January 2014 (with a total budget of over 1.35 million euros), as an opportunity for SMEs and developers to obtain funding for developing innovative applications and services using the FI-Content platform.

CityOS

i2CAT is participating in the Barcelona City Council CityOS project as technical advisor in the definition of the ICT open platform architecture to be implemented in order to become a city operating system, where any city information originating from sensors, infrastructures, services and citizens could be collected and processed to provide smart services and improve the efficiency of public resources.

RIS3CAT

i2CAT is participating, in collaboration with different local entities, in the definition of strategic projects aligned within the Regional Innovation Strategy for Smart Specialisation of Catalonia (RIS3CAT). In the Smart Region field (SmartCatalonia), i2CAT is collaborating with the General Directorate of Telecommunications and Information Society of the Catalan government, defining a variety of initiatives aimed at innovating public services by taking advantage of the potential offered by Internet technologies and increasing the participation and commitment of citizens. Furthermore, i2CAT is collaborating with the CIM Foundation in the definition of initiatives in the field of Smart Factories, which will allow for the creation of new production systems, and where there are initiatives such as the European Factories of the Future (FOF) which would allow funding to be raised to help improve the competitiveness of our industry.