SIH – Smart Islands Hub

SIH is based on the island of Madeira, an Autonomous Region on the Atlantic Ocean and an outermost region of Europe. Taking advantage of being on Madeira Island, SIH wants to develop solutions to help the local businesses and that may be valuable for other isolated territories, to address the major challenges that they may face due to their remoteness, insularity, small size, difficult topography and climate, ageing, outmigration of young people, and economic dependence on a reduced number of products. The competitive advantages brought in by the SIH will aid companies from these regions to have a more competitive participation in the Digital Single Market.
SIH aims to become Madeira’s one-stop-shop for digital transformation and, in partnership with other island-based entities and DIHs, offer services to contribute to the proliferation of smart islands.

Services

• Awareness creation
• Ecosystem building, scouting, brokerage, networking
• Collaborative Research
• Concept validation and prototyping
• Testing and validation
• Digital Maturity Assessment
• Incubator/accelerator support
• Market intelligence
• Access to Funding and Investor Readiness Services
• Mentoring
• Education and skills development
• Development of new digital solutions and business models
• Generation and provision of datasets

Additional information

The SIH consortium is led by Madeira’s Regional Agency for the Development of Research, Technology and Innovation (ARDITI). ARDITI is a private non-profit agency that has, as founding shareholders, Madeira’s Regional Government, the University of Madeira and local companies interested in R&D, technology and innovation. Besides the leading regional R&D, innovation, and technology entities, the SIH consortium builds on the competences of nationwide R&D institutions (FCT-UNL, Uninova, Circular Economy Colab, and the Colab Smart Energy Lab), and other actors of Madeira’s innovation ecosystem, like the chamber of commerce – ACIF-CCIM – and Startup Madeira, the local incubator, to further the connection between the SIH and the local companies.

Focus sectors:

• Energy
• Circular economy, environment, and sustainability
• Public administration
• Mobility and logistics
• Health and biotechnology
• Commerce and services.

Focus technologies:

• Data science & big data
• Artificial intelligence
• Cybersecurity
• Digital solutions/interoperability for the public sector
• High-performance computing