ERUDITE, or ‘Enhancing Rural and Urban Digital Innovation Territories’, is a project funded under INTERREG Europe programme. Since April 2016, the project partners from Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Slovenia and Sweden are assisting rural and more marginal urban regions across Europe to develop, design, implement and improve digital services that capitalise on the potential offered by High Speed Broadband Networks. Currently, partners are successfully extending High-Speed Broadband infrastructure to cover urban and rural communities enabling all stakeholders involved to contribute and benefit from the digital economy and society.

The aim of the project is to fully exploit the economic and social potential of networks, to design new services that respond to real public, private and community needs and which justify public investments in infrastructure and uses. In that way, ERUDITE partners meet regularly to share expertise and exchange knowledge to create services through open innovation and social return on investment processes. The upcoming meeting will take place in the North West of Ireland in October.  

The ERNACT network of regions, as a project partner in ERUDITE, will address the Local Economic and Community Plan (LECP) for County Donegal through a six-year framework to guide the strategic direction of future activity and relevant funding streams within Donegal. More concretely, the measure concerned is the Donegal Digital action plan developed within the LECP process, which mandated that a separate Donegal Digital Action Team be set up to develop and implement the action plan. The main goals of this instrument are:

• Digitally-skilled communities co-creating services with the business and public sectors.
• An expanded digital cluster, home to indigenous and FDI companies.
• A working, visible and relevant Donegal digital research and innovation environment.

Next ERUDITE event

From 17^th to 19^th October 2017, the INTERREG ERUDITE partners will meet in Donegal (Ireland) to work on open innovation and social return on investment local processes, to explore new frontiers of innovation through study visits and above all to work on the theme of connecting digital hubs and innovation centres’ across Europe. Partners will have the opportunity to get inspiring presentations from other Digital Innovation Hubs and models in Europe.

More information will be provided in the coming weeks.