SME4SMARTCITIES – Mediterranean SME working together to make cities smarter is a project funded by the European Union under the ENI CBC MED program to support SMEs (in Italian SME – Small and Medium Enterprises) in developing innovative and technological solutions in the 4 Mediterranean countries involved in the project: Spain, Italy, Israel and Palestine.
The objective is to make the cities of Murcia, Málaga, Genoa, Tel Aviv, Kfar Saba and Ramallah “smarter” by promoting their economic and social development through the cooperation of relevant international partners and trigger collaborations that create Euro-Mediterranean economic clusters. The following are part of the project: the Business Innovation Center of Murcia (lead institution); the FILSE – Financial Agency, Business Innovation Center of the Liguria Region; the European Business and Innovation Centre (BIC) of Málaga; the University of Tel Aviv; and the Municipality of Kfar Saba.
SMEs make up 99 percent of the EU’s economic activity and are a backbone of it, employing more than 100 million people and contributing more than half of Europe’s GDP (source: European Commission). They are defined as all entities with fewer than 250 employees – fewer than 50 in the case of small enterprises and fewer than 10 in the case of microenterprises – engaged in an economic activity, regardless of their legal form and type of activity.
SMEs, today, play a key role in addressing challenges related to environmental sustainability, urban mobility, economic and social well-being, inclusion and – more generally – the livability of contemporary cities. Through dialogue with local and international institutions they can make an important contribution by acting as driving forces of technological innovation. In this scenario, SME4SMARTCITIES aims to incentivize startups, companies and territorial and supranational entities to propose and implement cutting-edge solutions that lead to a more efficient, eco-friendly and citizen-friendly management of our cities – particularly Mediterranean ones – by making them “smart,” that is, by getting them to adopt innovative and highly digitized approaches in the management of their resources and services.
SME4SMARTCITES was launched on September 1, 2019 and ended on September 30, 2023. With the involvement of about 50 SMEs in 6 different cities in the Mediterranean, it resulted in a training program, an SME support platform (click here to read more), an SME cooperation program in the Mediterranean, and seven “Smart City Solutions.”
