Bax & Company present at the Smart City Expo World Congress

On Tuesday 14 November, over 700 cities from 120 countries gathered in Barcelona for The Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC) to exchange knowledge on how they can make their cities smarter and more efficient.

Bax & Company consultant, Claus Mullie, presented at the SCEWC, demonstrating how we help cities learn how to manage data-driven innovation projects.

Claus Mullie at SCEWC

Claus Mullie at SCEWC

Speaking at the Expo, Claus, said, “We work on many different projects, from reducing the weight of cars, creating an energy trading platform based on blockchain technology, transforming parks to help manage flood risk, and making social housing more energy efficient.”

Often, we work with cities who are looking to overcome frustrations and challenges; whether in their infrastructure, exploiting data or engaging with their citizens. Some of them have been disappointed that the projects they were funding and running were not delivering what they expected, or that they simply were not very valuable to the people living and working in their cities.

Claus highlighted these challenges to the audience, suggesting the potential obstacles, and — more importantly, how they can  be tackled.

How can cities unlock value from data?

Frequently, we see organisations or cities implementing data driven initiatives and expecting high quality results. They employ data-driven platforms and tools or harvest large amounts of data, yet struggle to see the intended results.

These kinds of approaches have one thing in common: they’re implemented because they think data is — as Claus told the Smart City Expo, “Some kind of magic powder that instantly solves all your problems.” However, just because an initiative is data-driven, it doesn’t mean that the outcomes will be as desired.

We help cities and organisations to define the problems they need to address and construct a strategy in order to feasibly solve them. Then, we facilitate the implementation of relevant data-driven solutions, to see real results.

Presenting at the Expo, Claus said, “Cities need great ideas, but they also need to learn how to manage the implementation of these ideas. Part of this is taking an interesting idea – such as reusing data, opening data, data analytics, data sharing, or big data – and making sure you apply it to a problem that needs solving and that can be feasibly solved.”

SCORE, a new project that we are managing, is centred around making city data open so that it can be reused and leveraged to improve public services. The cities have defined 12 shared challenges to improve municipal services by 20%, whilst reducing costs by 10%. The services will include the environment, water, parking and sustainable transport. They will then be tested in ‘living labs’, with the data and insights generated shared across all partners, helping them to implement these solutions. Due to the data being open and available, cities are able to share their experiences and learn from one another, making them more efficient.

Welcoming our Smart City partners to Barcelona

After a bustling first day at SCEWC 2017, we invited our Smart City Network to our Barcelona headquarters for food, drinks and networking. This was a fantastic opportunity to bring our valued partners together and celebrate projects that we have been working on, and look ahead to new ones.

Smart City networking at our Barcelona HQ

Smart City networking at our Barcelona HQ

Representatives from the cities of Amsterdam, Helsinki, Ghent, Bruges, Roeselare, Bergen and Johanneberg Science Park joined us in Barcelona along with our SCALE-UP partners CLEAN (Denmark), RISE (Sweden), i-Cleantech Vlaanderen (Belgium), Clean Tech Delta (Netherlands) and Cambridge Cleantech (UK).

Dr. Sebastiaan van Herk, our Smart City director said, “This was a great opportunity to welcome our network into Bax & Company and share ideas and experiences about the expo.”

We would like to thank the Smart City Expo World Congress for inviting Bax & Company to present and thank our smart city partners for their collaboration. We look forward to working with you, in the future to attain value from science and technology in our cities. 

If you want to get involved with one of our Smart City projects, get in contact at @baxcompany.com

Recommended Posts