The current economic crisis, combined with growing citizen expectations, is placing increasing pressure on European cities to provide better and more efficient infrastructures and services, often for less cost.  Innovative, ICT-based solutions - particularly those created in the user driven, open innovation environments of Living Labs (LLs) - hold an important key to helping European cities resolve this dilemma and work ‘smarter.’ 

Following significant support from the European Commission, Living Labs have proved to be an effective means to close the gap between innovative R&D and market take up, and make the innovation process more efficient.  Networks such as ENoLL, the European Network of Living Labs have, in turn, helped to mainstream this new and important means of generating innovation.

Despite these strides, however, the outputs from LLs still remain relatively fragmented – making it hard for European cities to learn from one another and for SME’s to market innovative new, user-driven applications in a scalable and cost effective manner.  The European Platform for Intelligent Cities – EPIC – addresses this short-coming head on by creating an open, pan-European platform for web-based ‘infrastructure and software as a service’ that enables ‘smart cities’ to learn from one another and exchange practical working models in a real-life context. EPIC represents a logical ‘next step’ in EU policy, intentionally designed by SME’s and larger industry players to operationalise the bench marking work of pioneering projects like Apollon.

The EPIC platform combines the industrial strength of IBM’s ‘Smart City’ vision and cloud computing infrastructure with the knowledge and expertise of leading European LL’s and municipalities such as iMinds iLab.o, ISSY-Media and Manchester to ensure the development of a European ‘innovation ecosystem’ that provides an extensive range of opportunities for sustainable, user-driven web-based services for citizens and businesses. EPIC accelerates the uptake of these new services across Europe by combining the world-leading business expertise of Deloitte Consulting with the practical, first-hand knowledge of ENoLL to deliver a robust roadmap that will help cities across Europe upscale from the LL environment to real-life urban deployment.

The EPIC team understands that to be truly ‘smart’ a city must be able to easily access and leverage the benefits of SME and citizen-driven and tested services as well as to anticipate and plan for powerful new innovations such as the Internet of Things (IOT) and Future of the Internet which will, among other things, enable them to digitise and connect their infrastructures in a manner that infuses them with intelligence. Toward this end, IOT specialists Birmingham City University will work closely with technology partners such as IBM to ensure that the EPIC platform is fully capable of providing IOT-enabled services. Business consultant partners like Deloitte and 21c additionally ensure that the EPIC roadmap is fully future-proofed for new instrumentations such as ‘smart water, electricity and transport grids.’

EPIC combines i) user-driven open innovation, ii) connected smart cities and iii) web-based services in the following manner:

1. Partner Living Labs engage citizens and SME’s in the innovation process, driving creation of new services that citizens, businesses and city visitors want
2. Partner cities plug existing and new co-designed web-based services into the open EPIC platform so that other cities, such as relative newcomers like Tirgu-Mures in Romania,  can easily connect to the platform and use them

Partner consultants and subject matter experts leverage pilot findings to help create a business-oriented, public-private partnership roadmap that incorporates a variety of differing business models from open source, to pay per use and licensing.