Best practises

Why make use of the best practices?

The services provided by the Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) constitute their raison d’être: The very core of a DIH – and “their reason for existing” – is to provide easily accessible assistance and services within different fields and disciplines, to small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), large companies and public sector actors across Europe. The aim and purpose of these services is to help these actors reap the benefits of the digital transformation and ultimately realise the Digitising European Industry Strategy and the Digital Single Market. This set of webpages provide a summary on best practices to share knowledge and allow for other organisations to build on the experience and results of others. Based on this, the intended readership of this report is:

  • existing DIHs which are looking to improve current services or add new services to their portfolio.
  •  organisations that are looking to become or establish a DIH in their region.

Organization aspiring to become a DIH will benefit from this web resource by finding information about specific services that they will have to offer as a I&M DIH.

Already existing DIHs, will have a twofold benefit from this resource: Firstly, they may obtain information about services which are offered by other DIHs. We expect this to provide hints on how to improve the way specific services are offered. Secondly, it is obvious that existing DIHs may learn how to expand their portfolio by offering new services to their local/regional stakeholders and users.

In addition to these actors, this report can more generally speaking be of interest for readers who are looking to learn more about the concept of a DIH, the services they provide and what constitutes best practice related to these services.

The best practices presented here are based on a series of discussions with the partners in the RIMA project (i.e., several DIHs and industry associations) according to how they provide services today. We have named the service categories (ecosystem, technology and business) and sub-categories according to a taxonomy presented by TNO, and we describe the actual content of each service category and sub-category based on input from the discussions with the RIMA partners.

Categorization of DIH services. The main categories and sub-categories are from TNO while the description of actual services and activities (right-most column) are inspired from a table by TNO and developed further in RIMA to adapt to the specific services delivered by the DIHs in RIMA. 

Ecosystem

Technology

These service categories aim to create environments where SMEs, larger industries, competence centres, system integrators and technology transfer centres share knowledge and experience in order to establish fruitful collaborations.

These service categories aim to facilitate technological development in different sectors related to I&M robotics. The DIHs provide support and infrastructure to carry out projects.

Business

These encompass key aspects of establishing know-how and new projects and leading them to commercialization.