Despite the absence of financial systemic support of Smart Cities in Slovakia, the market for Smart City services is constantly growing. Indeed, applying Smart City principles would greatly enhance people’s quality of life, improve the business environment by selling innovative products to cities and regions, and yield significant savings to public finances. This is the reason why an increasing interest in this topic has been observed over the past year by Slovak municipalities and the Ministry of Economy (MoE), which wants to respond to the global trends and to support the introduction of adequate innovative solutions in Slovak cities and towns.

To do so, the Ministry of Economy has prepared, as a first step, a document called “The Support of Innovative Solutions in Slovak Cities”. In preparing this paper, the Ministry was inspired by various examples of already implemented solutions and success stories at home and abroad. The document, which encourages the public at large to seek long-term innovative solutions for cities, provides information on the possibilities of financing Smart cities projects and a list of innovative SMEs.

As a second step, the Ministry has developed a financial support scheme to help unlock the potential of innovative SMEs, namely to remove several barriers including the absence of proof of concept, the lack of prototyping, insufficient scale-up studies and to foster commercialisation of the product.

The scheme is implemented in two phases: first, a feasibility study is conducted to evaluate and analyse the potential of the project. Then, the innovative solution is implemented in practice in a Slovak city, thus increasing its competitiveness, improving its infrastructure and quality of life. In the framework of the pilot testing of the proposed support mechanism, launched in May 2018, five projects aiming to apply innovative solutions in practice are to be supported,

As Rick Robinson wrote in The Urban Technologist, “Smart City isn’t a technology concept; it’s the political challenge of adapting one of the most powerful economic and social forces of our time to the needs of the places where most of us live and work“.

Further information on the MoE support scheme is available here (in SK): http://www.economy.gov.sk/ministerstvo/dotacie/dotacie-v-roku-2018.