In September and October 2015 I had the chance to meet with local administration officials, young entrepreneurs and students, during one-day specialised training sessions on "Smart Cities and Local Development with the participation of Administration, Industry and Academia", held in Samos and Rhodes.
These training workshops attracted audience from local communities and were a good platform to work on a few innovative ideas for public-private partnership development - which later led to the SMART-MED project idea on developing smart-city solutions via entrepreneurship and not procurement.
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| With my audience in Samos |
Together with colleagues from the University of the Aegean, we talked and discussed on cases for smart cities, e-government solutions in local administration, joint programmes between municipalities and enterprises, funding opportunities and the sort.
Being in Samos every week, the visit to Rhodes was the new thing: a splendid as always old town, but also a vibrant community of hotel owners and touristic businesses laid the landscape for a two-day intensive course of training sessions and meetings.
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| The class in Rhodes |
I promised I will certainly be revisiting the case of tourism-oriented entrepreneurship with local Union of Hotel owners - something that now materialised in the INNOVECO project idea for demand-based entrepreneurship and successfully presented at the Berkeley Global Venture Lab, in San Francisco, on January 2016.
A summary of my talk on smart cities can always be found at: http://www.slideshare.net/charalabidis/smart-cities-47555056
