Time to bet on the ‘Digital Innovation Hubs’

By David Paez, Director of Business Development at the Technological Corporation of Andalusia (CTA)

The geopolitical map and the distribution of power in the world is changing at a rapid pace, with the distance between the US and Europe and the strengthening of emerging countries, among other major trends. Faced with this situation, the European Union is convinced, with good judgment, that the Old Continent needs to increase the degree of digitalization of its economy so as not to go back in its global positioning. Therefore, it has launched a program called Digital Europe, with the purpose of stimulating the implementation of technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Supercomputing or Cybersecurity, in which, until now, most of the technological developments come from the US and Asia – above all, China-.

One of the measures that the European Commission considers crucial in this endeavor is the deployment throughout the continent of a network of digital innovation hubs – Digital Innovation Hubs or IHL, in English – and, to achieve this, it plans to mobilize shortly Community budget, having already defined general criteria broad enough so that each region can adapt them to its needs. It is a decisive moment for Andalusia and Spain to take advantage of this initiative and propose to the Commission its Digital Innovation Hubs strategy that allows them to take advantage of their own capacities to strengthen the economy.

IHLs are groups of entities with complementary capacities that are established as references in certain economic sectors in each European region to support the business and public sectors in digitalization. They must serve as a laboratory for the development and implementation of new technologies; train and train to ensure the digital competence of human resources; and support in the search for the investment necessary to implement new digital solutions.

It is not about creating new structures or inventing anything new, but about combining complementary capacities that already have a shared objective in an area where there are opportunities and try to incorporate existing economic sectors and productive activities. For example, CTA collaborates in the European ICT BIOCHAIN ​​project, led by the Andalusian Ministry of Agriculture, which has launched an Andalusian IHL and an Irish IHL as pilots to support the digitalization of the biomass supply chain, which involves sectors such as agri-food, energy and environmental, biotechnology or, of course, ICT.

Universities, technology centers, companies and business associations have the shared challenge of combining their digitalization efforts through these hubs and the Administrations with competencies have the challenge of promoting and orchestrating these efforts by designing an IHL strategy that takes advantage of this opportunity posed by the European Comission.