The Government of Karnataka has announced the launch of Asia’s first ‘DataCity’ programme – in collaboration with French-based utility firm SUEZ, Bangalore Water Supply & Sewerage Board (BWSSB) and Paris-headquartered innovation hub NUMA, which engages with startups, cities and corporations to foster innovation and solve global challenges.

 

DataCity is an international open innovation programme that builds innovative solutions to answer the challenges of global cities. It brings together city authorities, corporates and startups to address cities' challenges and develop innovative solutions to build sustainable and efficient cities, using data and technology.

 

The seven-month-long programme in India aims to bring together the City of Bengaluru with the corporates to co-create a ‘problem statement’, to identify relevant innovative startups from a pool of applications and to experiment the solutions that is crafted using data provided by the city of Bengaluru and the corporate parties involved.

 

Areas of opportunity that could be explored through the DataCity programme include: Smart Mobility, Water and Waste Management, Energy, Smart Buildings, Transparency & Security and pollution management.

 

“Growing cities are facing tremendous challenges in terms of services and infrastructure provision,” observed Mr Gaurav Gupta, IAS – the Principal Secretary at the Government of Karnataka. “We must join our forces to find solutions. Collaboration is key to innovation: it is the smart collaboration that will help build smarter cities.”

 

Developing “resilient and sustainable” cities

 

“Our collaboration with NUMA has been to support the Group's digital strategy for the development of resilient and sustainable cities,” Mr Gupta continued, adding that SUEZ participated in the DataCity open innovation programme – organised since 2015 by the NUMA incubator with the City of Paris, the French State and private sector companies – with the aim of meeting the challenges of cities with the help of data. “The programme transformed Paris into a gigantic playground to test new urban solutions devised by entrepreneurs through the use of existing data. In 2017, DataCity went international and launched its first edition of DataCity Casablanca with Lydec as its partner,” he reported.

 

Mr Shyam J Bhan, the CEO of SUEZ India, said that the aim of SUEZ – a leading utility operating largely in the water treatment and waste management sectors –in India was “to engage in an open innovation programme” within which it could “build a collaborative ecosystem involving customers, innovative start-ups, experts, researchers” and the SUEZ team to work together to develop solutions. “This is the main objective of our partnership with NUMA,” he advised.

 

Ms Souad Tenfiche, CEO NUMA Bengaluru, added that urbanisation presented a major challenge, with around 70 per cent of the world’s population expected to be living in cities by 2050. “We need to address today our urban challenges to build the cities of tomorrow,” she stressed. “NUMA designed DataCity [will] help [in] creating these concrete solutions with the potential to be replicated and scaled across cities of the global DataCity network.”