Peer review: Smart city testbeds

In May 2021, the Czech Republic adopted its national Smart Cities strategy. The Strategy has been the first tangible outcome of an effort to grasp the development of Smart Cities in a systemic way and with top-down coordination from the government level

In March 2022, the theoretical Smart Cities strategy was followed by the adoption of its more practically oriented Implementation Plan. This led to the Ministry of Industry and Trade being assigned to elaborate “Testbeds for new Smart City solutions” as one of the measures under the Implementation Plan.

The Ministry would like to use the peer review to gain a look under the hood of agile piloting and other smart city testbed initiatives and to decompose their models to particular steps, processes and stakeholder actions in order to get as much practical insight as possible

Under the moderation of Luc Schmerber, Thematic Expert on SME Competitiveness, and Elena Ferrario, Thematic Manager of the Policy Learning Platform, the peer review will focus on two thematic issues:

• Administrative processes including financing and selection of projects in the context of public procurement rules.
• Involvement of experts and ecosystem cooperation of stakeholders towards best practice sharing and internationalization.

The peer review is an invitation-only event. However, key learnings of the peer review will be published afterwards in a follow-up article on the Interreg Europe website.