SMART ERA

Rural communities are often deprived of much sought-after jobs, good service provision, adaptation and mitigation strategies, and a favourable ecosystem for entrepreneurship and social innovation. This situation is one of the most important factors behind emigration and brain drain.
The Smart Villages approach, tested in a previous 2018-2021 project, combines social innovation and new technologies and has the potential to support digital, social and community innovations to provide rural communities with innovative and smarter solutions that increase access to services, opportunities and appropriate innovation ecosystems.

Building on this successful experience, the project aims to enhance the approaches, methods, tools and skills developed within the Interreg Smart Village project; to empower rural communities by creating prototypes and validating with them new techniques, technological, business, organisational and social innovations to foster change in different sectors (e.g. social services, health, energy, mobility, climate adaptation and mitigation, biodiversity and ecosystem management, education, access to culture, etc.); to strengthen relations and knowledge exchange between smart and rural villages, community innovators, through transnational and macro-regional networks; to transfer the proposed innovations to other European villages in similar conditions.

SMART ERA aims to reduce vulnerability and strengthen resilience in rural areas through the creation of Smart Innovation Packages (SIPs) co-constructed with local communities. These packages will include technological, governance, financial, as well as social and policy tools in order to address the most pressing socio-economic and environmental challenges of these areas, to increase the well-being of rural populations in terms of access to services, job opportunities and appropriate innovation ecosystems, as well as resilience to shocks.

The project recognises the need for strategic and shared interventions to build innovative and durable solutions together with local communities and will work specifically in 6 pilot areas in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Finland, Italy, Slovenia and Spain.

2024

- 17-18 January kick-off meeting at Fondazione Bruno Kessler
- 18 April meeting with the mayors of Val di Sole
- 5-6 June transnational project meeting Mallorca (ES)
- 9 July meeting with the Val di Sole working group to define possible
experimentation
- 18-19 October participation in the conference 'Mountains for living: the future of the highlands
organised by the Franco DEMARCHI Foundation. The project was presented during a
parallel session dedicated to 'From digital to cohabitation with nature to regenerate the
territories'
- 22 October meeting in Malè with local actors in Val di Sole from the dairy and forestry sectors
(32 participants): facilitated discussion on opportunities and criticalities of the two supply chains and possible
innovative solutions.
- 3-4 December transnational project meeting Milan (IT)

2025

- 10 January meeting with the working group

- 29 January meeting with the extended working group

- 18 February face-to-face meeting in Pellizzano with local actors from the dairy chain
to identify possible concrete actions

- 27 March meeting with the working group

- 10 April in-presence meeting in Malè with the local actors of the dairy chain aimed at continuing the work begun and sharing operational practices for the concrete implementation of the actions, starting from the four operational strands that emerged from the previous meetings

- 29-30 April participation in the Digital Alps Conference 2025 in Lienz and presentation of the project and pilot Trentino, Austria

- 28-29 May online participation in the Plenary Meeting of the consortium in Bosnia - Herzegovina

- 3 October speech to disseminate the project at the presentation of the UNCEM Mountain Report 2025 in Trento

- 12/14 November study visit with local stakeholders at the Green Community La Montagna del Latte, in the Reggio Emilia Apennines, in Castelnovo ne' Monti