This year eChallenges Conference which has been organized in world’s major cities every year since 2003, was held between 21 and 23 October in Istanbul. 400 foreign and 150 Turkish researchers, representative of business world, from 37 countries, participated. TAGES CEO Leyla Arsan made a presentation in the conference on living labs with the topic of ‘Establishing a Living Lab in Turkey’.
The eighth of the eChallenges Conferences took place in Istanbul this year and many participants from all over the world have shared knowledge and experience, lessons learnt and good practices in the areas of ICT for Networked Enterprise & RFID, eGovernment & eDemocracy, eHealth, Collaborative Working Environments, Living Labs, eInfrastructures; Technology Enhanced Learning and ICT Skills, Knowledge and Content Technologies, Security and Identity Management, High Performance Computing – Applications and Mobility. Also the goal of e-2009 was to stimulate rapid take-up of Research and Technology Development (RTD) results by industry and in particular SMEs, and help to open up the European Research Area (ERA) to the rest of the world.
The conference started with opening speeches of European Commission Information Society and Media Director João da SILVA, president of The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, Prof. Dr. Nüket YETİS, president of Republic of Turkey Ministry of Trade and Industry Small and Medium Enterprises Development Organization, Mustafa KAPLAN and president of The Confederation of Turkish Tradesmen and Craftsmen Bendevi PALANDÖKEN. TAGES CEO Leyla Arsan made a presentation on living labs on the last day of the conference and she gathered four groups for the needs of motivation:
- ICT Industry Emerging Needs
- Other Industries, Enterprises and SMEs Needs
- Human Trends vs Global Trends (Collaborating, Clustering…)
- Emerging Country Needs; Turkey
About ICT industry emerging needs she mentioned about EITO 2008 Reports and she stated that while the total of worldwide ICT market was 1.984,2 Billion Euro in 2005, it has been 2.363,4 Billion Euro in 2008 and in 2009 it is expected to grow by 5,3%. If we only observe software market size, it has the only highest growth rate as 7,1% among other ICT areas like IT services, IT equipments and telecom. This means that ICT and especially ‘software’ is a big area still to be developed and disseminated to all other industries by interdisciplinary approaches and integrations.
Also Arsan sorted the definition of the problems as follows:
- SMEs do not lead research, research leads SMEs
- SME needs and barriers change dynamically
- Not right persons from SMEs are joining in research projects
- Requirement analysis methodologies do not fit for SMEs
- Diversified requirements can not be merged
- Public organisations are unaware of the requirements of SMEs
She also sorted implementation problems as follows:
- Diversified cases can not be matched
- SMEs do not really understand how the research results will serve
- Manufacturers do not see any relation with internet applications
In the rest of the presentation about Human Trends vs Global Trends (Collaborating, Clustering…) she emphasized that ‘People do not want to move for work. But they have to…’. And she stated the objectives of the Emerging Country Needs,Turkey, as networking and integrating across border living labs and similar acting like structures and sharing and integrating innovative ICT platforms and tools targeted at the needs of SMEs, users, citizens and industry.
Also she emphasized methodology of APOLLON Project that is using the advantage of a new establishment for an ICT community in an emerging country like Turkey and to use this area as a pilot platform; defining common concepts of the existing structures and platforms; benchmarking living labs similar platforms for their ability of integrate and ability of interdisciplinarity (here it is highly important to be able to understand the level of integration of the physical and virtual communities); defining new methodologies for integration and interoperability; implementing pilot actions in different areas and sharing results; 4 Pilot actions in energy efficiency, egovernance, ehealth (by bio-nano research needs) and ICT based services (service innovation); developing a tool for the integration of end user in research processes. Finely, at the end of her presentation Arsan said that we were in baby steps and we had many responsibilities to do about living labs in Turkey.
