Aveiro

In recent years, job creation was a top priority of EU & of Southern economies in particular. Unemployment in Portugal had peaked at an upsetting 18% in 2013, and thousands of qualified workers were forced to leave the country in search of new opportunities. Today the situation has changed dramatically. Unemployment in Portugal has halved to 8%, which nearly corresponds to a full employment situation. However in Aveiro, in the past 12 months, hundreds of jobs offers were not fulfilled, including those for data analysts and coders, showing a clear mismatch between supply/demand in the digital sector. This scenario might not lead only to great loses for the companies’ competitiveness, but consequently also to the loss of existing jobs.

A medium-size city as Aveiro has to compete with the stronger national economic centres of Lisbon & Porto, where large multinational companies usually invest, increasing the “brain drain” to those centres. The challenge for Aveiro today is not how to create more jobs, but how to improve the added-value and socio-economic wealth produced by the jobs created. 
Such a complex and present-day challenge cannot be addressed by traditional means. It means helping local firms to rethink the resources they need to innovate and grow, and that may not be just those traditionally associated with functions like engineers, coders, etc., but other creative roles equipped with the necessary digital competences. 

Our project, will address the challenge related to the city's capacity to attract and retain the necessary talents for its economy to grow and produce more added-value, via two innovative approaches: 
First, rethinking the educational/qualification system responsiveness to labour market needs. Our solution here is to build on the strong educational offer of the city, and in particular of University of Aveiro, to produce a new range of talents – including artistic, creative and human sciences areas – with a STEAM approach (adding the “A” for Arts and creativity to the domains of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) and ensuring that supply and demand for new digital skills and competences are matched, in order to contribute to the improvement of the average added-value produced by employee in the city. The creation of a Responsive Observatory will determine (at every moment) the skills demand of our economy and will design and implement short-term education/qualification courses adapted to those needs. 
Second, Aveiro will move decisively into a new enhanced technological level, changing the way city actors perform and interact, and thus differentiating it from its competitors at home and abroad. For that, Aveiro will become a trial city for 5G technologies, using it as the basis for the transition into a next economy based on knowledge and digital platforms, valorising RD&I, open data and the development of new products and services for the growth and creation of new companies and jobs. 

• City of Aveiro
• Instituto de Telecomunicações - R&D Institute
• Altice Labs - R&D Institute
• Universidade de Aveiro - Universities and Research Centre
• CEDES - Universities and Research Centre
• INOVARIA - association of businesses

The final result will be an enhanced added-value local economy, built around better-paid, more sustainable, productive and qualified jobs, that contribute to produce more competitive goods and services, not only for the national market, but at global level. We will:

• Implement an Innovative IoT Digital Urban Platform to Support City Management 
• Enable a 5G/IoT infrastructure operating within the scope of an Innovative Business Model integrating public bodies, academia, R&D centre and companies
• Implement 34 Tech Lab and a STEAM Educational Program in Primary Schools 
• Implement a Responsive Labour Observatory that will:

   - Support the reskill of our actual workforce in order to adapt to the new challenges of our local economy – over 90 participants in medium-term training courses from different sectors of our economy

- Support the reskill from our arts graduates to learn digital skills with short-term training innovative schemes – over 40 participants.
 

September 2019: Aveiro Digital Urban Platform [version 1.0] will be presented with the integration from data collection from some Use Cases related with Mobility, Environment and Energy

October 2019: Deployment of the 5G Aveiro Tested that will support the implementation of 5G Urban Challenges and attract innovative Start-ups and R&D Centres to test products and services that require 5G Communications

December 2019: Deliver of 34 STEAM Tech Labs in public Primary Schools and initiation of the Training activities to support the implementation of the Educational STEAM program

May 2020: Digital Hub implemented in “Edifício Fernando Távora” 

October 2020: Evaluation of the first Pilot Action Results of the “STEAM Training Skills Program for Local Economy”

December 2020: Evaluation of the Results from the 1st edition of the Urban Challenges and 5G Challenges Outputs