Digital innovation hubs and demonstrators

On 22 November 2022, the Policy Learning Platform organised a workshop on the topic of digital innovation hubs and demonstrators. It explored the role of regional policymakers in supporting digital transformation and the competitiveness of European businesses.

It attracted 40 participants and was organised at Aalto University in Espoo, Finland. Representatives of the Finnish innovation ecosystem along with other European regions shared their experiences in building digital innovation hubs to accelerate the take up of digitalisation opportunities for companies.

What was the workshop about? 

Digital innovation hubs (including demonstrators/testbeds) have become Europe-wide a major instrument to support the digital transformation of businesses, improve their innovation capacities and foster competitiveness.

Some of the main discussion points raised throughout the workshop revealed the challenges and opportunities of EDIHs:

• Nobody walks alone: reinforcing ecosystems and strengthening partnerships are key to serving business at best, sharing tasks coherently, share information in a win-win approach: This approach is very much valid on the local and national, but also on the European level;
• The European approach of the EDIH offers thereby, especially an opportunity for business support providers to develop across national borders a common approach and possibly even some kind of standardisation – in name and content - of support services provided by EDIHs;
• Both the intermediaries and the public administrations should agree to adopt the problem-solving and efficiency attitude of the business approach when looking at their common challenges to invest in digitalisation and business support;

To learn more about this topic, explore the follow-up brief our experts have prepared for you. It contains insights on building digital innovation hubs as well as inspiring Interreg Europe good practices and policy recommendations.