Prague, October 24, 2024 – The 10th anniversary edition of the Smart Business Festival CZ took place yesterday in Prague—an event showcasing initiatives and opportunities for collaboration in the practical implementation of digital innovations, designed primarily for Czech small and medium-sized enterprises. The key subthemes of this year’s event were security, resilience, and sustainability, along with opportunities to strengthen these areas even for the smallest Czech companies and public organizations. The program featured six European Digital Innovation Hubs (EDIHs) operating in the Czech Republic, along with representatives from partner networks and projects collaborating with them. The event was organized by the CzechInno association in collaboration with the CyberSecurityHubCZ.
The event kicked off with opening remarks by Malgorzata Nikowska from the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT) and Petr Očko, Director-General of the Digitalization and Innovation Section, who said:
“From the perspective of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the Smart Business Festival is one of the key events where support for small and medium-sized enterprises—in particular—is discussed in the context of the Czech economy’s digital transformation, and we are pleased that we can present the latest developments from the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic here every year,” he added: “European Digital Innovation Hubs are key pillars of support for the digital transformation of companies in the Czech Republic. In addition to these, we also have a functioning project in the Czech Republic called the Testing and Experimentation Facility AI Matters, which specializes in supporting companies in implementing artificial intelligence into production. We are pleased that this project is running with support from both the EU and national-level sources. In addition, our ministry is implementing a whole range of other national programs—among the new initiatives, I would particularly like to mention a brand-new program to support research, development, and innovation called TWIST, which focuses in its first pillar on key strategic technologies—artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and semiconductors. We are currently preparing the first call for proposals, which should be published by the end of this year, and we look forward to many interesting projects.”
The morning program and the exhibition portion of the event also featured presentations by representatives of all six European Digital Innovation Hubs based in the Czech Republic, which will operate from 2023 to 2025 (with the prospect of continuing into the subsequent period), namely:
CyberSecurityHubcz based in Brno and specializing in cybersecurity and information security, operates nationwide and focuses on both small and medium-sized enterprises and public organizations. The consortium is managed by CyberSecurityHubCZ, which brings together Masaryk University, the Czech Technical University in Prague, and the Brno University of Technology as founding partners; the EDIH has a total of 9 partners.
EDIH CTU based in Prague and focused on artificial intelligence, coordinated by the Czech Technical University in Prague and comprising seven other partners. This EDIH also operates nationwide and focuses on supporting small and medium-sized enterprises as well as public organizations.
EDIH Ostrava with supercomputing and big data processing as its main technological areas, and a focus on the overall digital transformation of companies in the Moravian-Silesian Region; the project is led by the VŠB – Technical University of Ostrava, with the Moravian-Silesian Innovation Center serving as a partner.
EDIH Brain4Industry based in Dolní Břežany, which focuses on smart manufacturing, additive technologies, and artificial intelligence, with the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences serving as the coordinator and a total of four consortium partners.
EDIH DIGIMAT, based in Kuřim, which, as part of its focus on smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0, specializes primarily in robotics and artificial intelligence, as well as production optimization, including energy management. The consortium is coordinated by Intemac Solutions, and the EDIH comprises a total of four partners.
EDIH Northeast based in Liberec and comprising seven partners, which works to facilitate the digital transformation of businesses and public organizations in the Liberec and Hradec Králové regions.
Czech EDIH services are subsidized by the European Digital Europe program and the National Recovery Plan, allowing clients to receive a significant discount on these services or, in many cases, access them completely free of charge.
The EDIH network operates not only in the Czech Republic but also across the rest of Europe. In the current funding period, the European Commission has supported a total of 151 consortia across the EU through the Digital Europe program, many of which also provide services to Czech entities. The Smart Business Festival program featured, for example, EDIH DInO from Freyung, Bavaria, which offers its services to companies and public organizations in the Czech-Bavarian border region, and EDIH AI5Production from Vienna, which developed the so-called Digital Product Pass to increase the reliability of verifying the origin of goods in a cross-border context. Contact information for all European Digital Innovation Hubs, along with their sectoral and regional focus, can be found on the European Commission’s website.
Ondřej Beránek from AI Matters TEF thus provided an overview of his project’s services, and he and Anna Tahovská from the EIT Manufacturing Hub Czechia agreed that, from the perspective of their projects and their collaboration with EDIH CTU, the service offering is streamlined by the fact that all three projects in the Czech Republic are overseen by a single institution—namely, the Czech Technical University in Prague. Karel Charvát from DIH Plan4All presented one of the new projects linking artificial intelligence with geographic information systems (GIS), thereby facilitating planning in regional development. Petr Hladík, coordinator of the Enterprise Europe Network Czech Republic, then summarized the entire event and his network’s participation with the following words:
“The Smart Business Festival is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, and it is remarkable how much it has achieved in its ten-year history. The Technology Center Prague has been a professional partner of the festival throughout this time, and together with the organizers from the CzechInno association, it has always strived to highlight and support Czech technology companies with smart ideas and international business potential at the festival,” he added, “This is also the goal of the Enterprise Europe Network, which is coordinated in the Czech Republic by the Technology Center Prague.”
A separate section of the program focused on offering Czech companies and public organizations the opportunity to become more closely involved in the pan-European GAIA-X initiative, which enables technology-independent and GAIA-X-verified data storage and sharing across several sectors highly relevant to the European economy, such as industrial manufacturing, healthcare, public services, and tourism. Its representative, Frederik Tengg, called on Czech companies to make greater use of this network’s services as part of efforts to strengthen their resilience and independence from the services of tech giants, and encouraged Czech stakeholders to establish a Czech GAIA-X hub, which has not yet been set up.
The conference was followed by discussions at the presentation booths of the individual participating organizations, as well as a practical demonstration of the activities of one of EDIH CyberSecurityHubCZs clients—the Smíchov Secondary Technical School and Gymnasium, which also served as the venue for the event.
The Artificial Intelligence on Chip workshop, held in early April in Brno, brought together leading researchers, experts, and enthusiasts interested in current developments in the fields of artificial intelligence and semiconductor design. The two-day program offered a diverse overview of this rapidly evolving field, which is having a profound impact on the future of modern technology.
A delegation from the Indonesian National Cyber and Crypto Security Agency (BSSN) visited CyberSecurityHubcz. The visit focused on introducing CyberRangecz and touring the Hub's Brno premises.
