Digital

Blog

European Commission Digital

The European Commission and Digital Innovation Hubs explore future collaboration to accelerate digital transformation

A cartoon image in pale green, pale blue and yellow of two people working together on a giant, interactive screen, which is connected by lines with icons of documents to buildings in a cityscape background


On 3 July 2020, the European Commission held a webinar to explore how they could collaborate with Digital Innovation Hubs to accelerate the digital transformation of the public sector in the EU. The webinar brought together over 160 participants, many from Digital Innovation Hubs, and active contributions throughout shed invaluable insight on how a future collaboration might take shape. 

Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) are physical locations throughout Europe that provide a variety of services to support local, regional and national public administrations, as well as SMEs, in their digital transformation. This includes allowing such organisations to test out digital services and systems for free before investing in them, helping them find funding and providing the networking opportunities necessary to get established in the digital landscape.

The European Commission is also a driving force behind the digital transformation of Europe. Through the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) and ISA2 programmes, the Commission provides free, reusable and fully interoperable digital solutions to stimulate the digitalisation of key sectors throughout the EU. This ensures organisations go digital together, not apart, contributing to an inter-connected, pan-European network that is creating a seamless, convenient experience for businesses and citizens.

The purpose of this webinar was to explore how DIHs and the European Commission could achieve their common goal together by using DIHs to disseminate the open digital solutions provided by the European Commission. There was enthusiastic, active contribution from participants throughout, providing the following key insights:

  • DIH representatives showed a keen interest in the value of CEF’s and ISA2’s solutions for their target audience;
  • While the event was initially targeted at public sector transformation, there was particular interest in how the CEF and ISA2 teams could help DIHs to reach out to SMEs through communication materials that have already seen positive results (such as the vast uptake of the eTranslation machine translation tool since it was launched to SMEs);
  • As well as the solutions, the services and networking platforms provided by CEF and ISA2 could also support DIHs in helping their audience run pilots and go to market. 


The solutions

The following solutions attracted particular interest from those attending the webinar:

  • CEF's eTranslation Building Block: A state-of-the-art machine translation tool that can translate to and from over 24 EU languages, Russian and Mandarin, recently made freely available to all European SMEs;
  • CEF's eSignature Building Block: Enables the creation and testing of interoperable electronic signing solutions in order to facilitate the mutual recognition and cross-border interoperability of electronic signatures in Europe;
  • ISA2's Joinup: A collaborative platform where public administrations, businesses and citizens can share information, collaborate on projects and access a catalogue of reusable interoperability solutions.

You can view the slides and recording via the event's webpage:

The success of this webinar means that the CEF and ISA2 teams look forward to working ever more closely with Europe's Digital Innovation Hubs. This might be through collaborative workshops or more webinars.

You can visit the CEF Digital and ISA2 websites to find out which reusable digital solutions can help your organisation. If any of our solutions interest you, don’t hesitate to get in touch directly with the CEF Digital team, CEF-BUILDING-BLOCKS@ec.europa.eu, or the ISA2 team, isa2@ec.europa.eu.