The European Commission says it is now one step closer to approving two Irish digital hubs as European Digital Innovation Hubs.
The European Union is investing €700m to co-fund a Europe-wide network of hubs. Each Irish hub will receive annual funding of €1.9m from both the EU and the Irish government under the National Recovery and Resilience Facility.
These new hubs will work with local SMEs and public sector bodies to help them 'go digital’ and incorporate the benefits of digital technology in their operations, no matter what stage they are at currently.
The hubs will provide help with training, research and testing and advice on funding and will be up and running by the end of this year, according to the government.
The two hubs up for approval are CeADAR based in University College Dublin and the FactoryxChange consortium in the midlands. Both are supported by Enterprise Ireland.
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CeADAR, which is led by the EI/IDA Technology Centre in Applied Data Analytics and Machine Intelligence based in UCD, will focus on Artificial Intelligence transformation in SMEs and public service organisations.
FactoryxChange is a consortium led by the EI/IDA Technology Centre for Irish Manufacturing Research in Mullingar, the aim of which is to accelerate factories to become ‘Factories of the Future’, integrating ecological, digital, and societal solutions into their core business models.
Enterprise Ireland chief executive Leo Clancy said: “The ambition of the proposed hubs to provide services to SMEs related to digital transformation, circular economy, sustainability, artificial intelligence, manufacturing 4.0 is welcome, as is the regional spread of the hubs here and their overall complementarity.
“Increasing the competitiveness and productivity of SMEs through higher levels of operational focus, more innovation and digital adoption is very much in line with Enterprise Ireland’s three-year strategy ‘Leading in a Changing World’.”
There is now one further phase of due diligence before the Commission makes its final decision on eligibility, and it has also deemed two other Irish hubs eligible to join the EU network after they were awarded the Commission’s ‘seal of excellence’ for the quality of their proposals.
These are DATA2SUSTAIN, a consortium led by Atlantic Technological University, Sligo, which aims to develop a service programme to increase the transformation capacity and transformation speed of SMEs, with a focus on circular economy, operations and sustainability areas; and ENTIRE, a consortium led by Tyndall National Institute in Cork, which plans to help SMEs in the agriculture, energy and transport sectors to become more competitive by using digital technologies such as sensors.
