Slovak municipalities are under influence of major global and regional trends such as carbon neutrality measures, major shifts in the energy sector or new mobility patterns. Together with new technological advances which include but are not limited to AI, IoT or big data technologies and significant societal challenges of eldering society, migration of young talent to other EU countries and social media driven radicalism it is expected that they will undergo a significant transformation. There are many initiatives on the EU and national level to address this challenge. STICS will contribute to this transformation in the following way:

● Creating innovation ecosystems, based on data sharing among different types of stakeholders on the level of municipalities (e.g. public authorities, municipal companies, local businesses, local innovators).

● Providing tools stimulating stakeholders collaboration while sharing their data for the purposes of value creation:

○ Collaboration manager – maintaining data sovereignty i.e. data owners can decide which data to sharewith whom and under which conditions,

○ Enabling accessibility of data in interoperable formats, derived from widely adopted semantic standards(e.g. W3C, SAREF)

○ Creating data spaces of bottom-up governance i.e. clusters of different stakeholders with a common goal can pre-agree and enforce rules of collaboration and data sharing

● Demonstrating the benefits of innovation ecosystem in real life conditions (pilots)

○ Advancing domain applications with improvements based on emerging technologies (e.g. DLT, AI, Edgecomputing)

○ Bringing cross-cutting services with secondary utilisation of data from various domains, e.g.:

■ More relevant, comprehensive and accurate dashboards i.e. reflecting the users professionalbackground and actual information needs

■ Novel applications benefiting from large amount of data from multiple sources e.g. AI, Big data applications

○ Establishing living labs and maintaining them beyond the duration of the project to serve as innovationhubs for municipalities, industry and academia.

● Boosting the smart solutions and data economy markets enabling local players – existing ones and new ones that will emerge from activities of this TIC - to become relevant on global scale and thus one of the cornerstones of Slovak economy.

● Introducing marketplace (all-you-can-need buffet) of tools and data for municipal stakeholders enabled by interoperability.

● Readiness to collaborate with other European industrial ecosystems due to integration of Gaia-X processes and standards.

● Shift from traditional hierarchical supply chain business model to ecosystem business models more suited to higher complexity of requirements.

● Preparation of new educational courses for various target groups, resulting increasing capacities for utilisation by public sector (municipalities).

STICS follows on several past and ongoing projects from international funding schemes (e.g. Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe, INTERREG).