Jamie Cudden, Dublin Smart Cities coordinator will give a presentation on the launch of a joint initiative with Enterprise Ireland, to fund small business entrepeneurs to come up with technological ideas to help cycling grow in Dublin.

Jamie Cudden is driving the development and implementation of Dublin City’s Smart City strategy, liasing with Industry, Academia, Public Sector, and SMEs. He has worked in a variety of different policy roles for a number of organisations in the UK, and here in Ireland is a Company Secretary for Eco-UNESCO. He wants to make Dublin a leader in Smart City technology worldwide.

Smart Dublin is a collaboration framework that enables co-creation of solutions to priority challenges. Led by the 4 Dublin local authorities it sets out key operational challenges across areas of mobility, environment, energy and emergency management. The framework will encourage the development of solutions that address real needs, with an emphasis on applying emerging technology opportunities. We are launching Smart Dublin in March. The key message is that Dublin’s challenges can only be solved through collaboration. We will put a call out on how can we make Dublin smarter. If you have a great idea or proposal we want to hear from you. The Smart Dublin website will be a platform to submit ideas and proposals. The fist call will focus on the area of cycling. As part of this we are looking for smart solutions that can help scale up cycling usage in Dublin.

Scaling up Cycling usage in Dublin: This may include ideas in security, safety and generating better data on cycling in the city. We will offer access to: seed funds, access to test-bed infrastructure and city expertise We will have a 100k budget to develop this. Projects will only get funded if they reach a certain criteria. The idea scenario is that you fund 4 projects of about 10-15k each and then one or two companies will receive follow up funding to further develop their proposal (25k *2)

We will be working with Enterprise Ireland to develop this and will use the Small Business Innovation Research Scheme (SBIR) This involves a competitive approach to supporting solutions that address an unmet need in the marketplace. There will be 100k fund to support this.

Presentation from the night.