SIH

The Smart Islands Hub (SIH) is an important strategic effort, officially supported by the Regional Government to accelerate the Digital and Green transition of the Autonomous Region of Madeira. The consortium unites core organisations from R&D, Innovation and business ecosystem: ARDITI (coordinator), the University of Madeira, Startup Madeira, ACIF, NOVA University of Lisbon, Smart Energy Lab, Cecolab and Uninova. SIH also has the support of strategic stakeholders in the form of public institutions, local service providers and all the Municipalities of Madeira. SIH will provide solutions that will help SMEs, small midcaps and public sector organisations in their digital and green transformation, and promote capacity building and digital inclusion in the population of the Region. Our services will be available for similar regions and small economies that, like ours, are fully committed to sustainable development and quality of life for their citizens. Our position as an outermost region, further away from decision centres, where technology and innovation are more widespread, motivated the creation of a strategy to holistically develop our DIH and offer a more complete set of services for test before invest, skills & training, support to find investment and ecosystem and networking, applied to the areas of Energy, Circular Economy, Environment & Sustainability, Mobility & Logistics, Public Sector, Health & Biotechnology and Commerce & Services. We also cover a wider range of main technologies, from AI and Cybersecurity to Advanced Digital Skills. To reach our goals, we developed a project plan that integrates activities to promote technology transfer from our R&D entities to market innovation with the support of our business organisations, taking full advantage of our competence centres. The results will be shown by advancing the digital maturity of the organisations that benefit from our services, measured by a Digital Maturity Assessment.