EIT Urban Mobility is happy to announce the launch of 5 new RIS Hubs in Croatia, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia and Turkey. The call deadline was beginning of August and 19 applications were submitted with 43 entities involved. The main goal of the RIS Hubs is raising awareness, supporting the local stakeholders and managing the local community. Therefore, the RIS Hub is a local organisation or consortium of local organisations, which has been selected by an open call, and they act as an interaction point between EIT Urban Mobility, and local community stakeholders.
Following this logic, in 2020 we already established RIS Hubs in 7 RIS countries (Greece, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Serbia and Slovenia) and now we continue with the next 5: Croatia, Latvia, Romania, Slovakia and Turkey, to cover Europe as planned in EIT Urban Mobility’s RIS strategy. The most important factors of the implementation order were the size and activity of the local innovation ecosystem, the readiness of local large cities to participate, the need for catching up.
In Croatia, four organisations build the winning consortium lead by REGEA (North-West Croatia Regional Energy Agency Croatian Telecom, University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing and Invento Capital.
VEFRESH is leading the hub in Latvia cooperating with the Riga Technical University and Riga Council.
In Slovakia CIVITTA has been selected, a strong startup accelerator present not just in Slovakia but in the Baltics and many other Eastern Europe countries as well.
In Romania, ICEBERG is the lead partner together with the accelerator SPHERIK and The Federation of Metropolitan Areas and Urban Agglomerations.
In Turkey we have FARPLAS, a large and innovative company from the automotive industry as a leading partner, supported by Sabanci University and PwC Turkey.
The above RIS Hub consortiums provide good coverage of the knowledge triangle and excellent networking to the innovation ecosystem and to the local cities in all the countries. The Hubs have been selected for 7 years and our common goal is to boost the local innovation ecosystem closing the gaps and finding new talents that can be accelerated into successful performers on the international market.
Through our RIS Hubs we aim to improve urban mobility in the RIS countries and reinforce the synergies between local knowledge triangle actors, share new tools and technologies, and connect the local stakeholders with our international community.
RIS Hubs launched in 2020 are now welcoming the new ones on board and they are happy to share their experiences and best practices. Main focus for their tasks will be in:
- Setting up local startup competitions pushing the winners to join the next stage to EIT Urban Mobility’s business creation programmes, in which EIT Urban Mobility invests into the RIS startups.
- Setting up local innovation prizes
- Involving the local ministries in the EIT Urban Mobility activities
- Starting local educational programs for professionals are impressive results of the RIS Hub network, which best practices will be shared with the new members.
The EIT Regional Innovation Scheme (EIT RIS) was created in 2014 by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) to close the gap between the countries with strong and emerging or moderate innovation performance.
If you want to learn more about RIS Hubs, click here
