Dedagroup Public Services and Fondazione Bruno Kessler together for the development of INTERLINK — a European open innovation project

Trento (Italy), February 2nd, 2021 – INTERLINK (Innovating government and citizen co-delivery for the digital single market) is the European open innovation project set up with the precise aim of overcoming the barriers that prevent administrations from reusing and sharing services with private partners (including citizens), by developing a new transparent and collaborative governance model.

The INTERLINK kickoff meeting took place today. During the next three years the project partners will collaborate to implement the technologies required to achieve three use cases applied to three different Public Administrations: the Italian Ministry of the Economy and Finance, the Latvian Ministry for Regional Development and the City of Zaragoza. Italy will be represented by Fondazione Bruno Kessler, an international research center based in Trento which will act as coordinator, Dedagroup Public Services, a Dedagroup S.p.A.'s company supporting central and local Bodies and Public Service Agencies in digital transformation, and the Ministry of Economy and Finance. 

The project — which is part of the European Commission’s funding programme Horizon 2020, aimed at supporting and promoting EU open innovation research – will start with the use of technological solutions that are already available, the so-called digital “building blocks”. The aim is to usefully stimulate their development and evolution so as to build new shared services, which meet the necessary technical and legal requirements for their adoption by the Public Administrations, whilst ensuring the actual efficacy of the digital solutions increasingly often stemming from the collaboration between Public Administrations, citizens and associations.  

In this context of collaborative sharing, Dedagroup Public Services will make available its own expertise and experience gained working alongside the central administrations, as well as small local councils, and its own capability in terms of governance, analysis, integration and aggregation of heterogeneous data. This expertise is enshrined in the Digital Hub, an open innovation approach that the whole Group has implemented together with other innovation ecosystem players and that takes concrete shape in the Co-Innovation Lab, the joint initiative between Dedagroup and FBK, dedicated to the development of standards and good practices for the opening and interoperability of data and services.

“The INTERLINK project aims to promote collaboration between research, industry, public administrations and civil society, and is a perfect example of what is known as the quadruple helix innovation model,” emphasized Matteo Gerosa, coordinator of the INTERLINK project and Head of Project Management Group of the Fondazione Bruno Kessler. “The goal of INTERLINK, namely the development of innovation models for the co-management of services between the public administration and private individuals, is one of the strategic issues for digital transformation and is of prime interest for FBK’s new Digital Society center."

“In order to have a truly positive impact, the project has to consider the needs of all the stakeholders involved and provide for the resulting solutions to then be disseminated. Our role for INTERLINK will also be just that, to act as Innovation Manager, and bring all the parties involved to the table,” commented Luigi Zanella, Head of Business Development & Innovation at Dedagroup Public Services. “Our goal is to help to create technologies that can be again made available at European level and also reused at the end of this project, so as to enrich the shared heritage of the existing building blocks and support the digital transformation of Public Administrations in all EU countries.”

The partners in the project are: Fondazione Bruno Kessler (IT, Coordinator); Dedagroup Public Services (IT); Ministry of the Economy and Finance (IT); Deusto University (ES); Rabboud University (NL); Université Catholique de Louvain (BE); public entities such as City of Zaragoza (ES); Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development (LT); IT companies such as TreeTechnology (ES) and Cloud’sci (FI).

Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK)
Thanks to more than half a century of history and the expertise built in over 30 years of advanced research on Artificial Intelligence, through 11 centres and over 400 researchers, FBK aims to achieve excellent results in the scientific and technological field with particular regard to interdisciplinary approaches and the application dimension, acting as a true scientific and technological hub. 
www.fbk.eu

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