Issy-les-Moulineaux, a city just across the Seine from Paris, has an employment rate close to 96%. More than 75% of its companies are in information and communications technologies. Issy’s employers today field a workforce that is slightly larger than the city’s population, because so many companies have moved out of central Paris to take advantage of its infrastructure, business-friendly climate, lower local taxes and innovative services.

It was not ever thus.

Prior to World War II, Issy-les-Moulineaux (which translates into English as Issy of the Windmills) was the factory zone of the Paris metro area. It was also home to an army base that, in 1908, saw the historic first 1-kilometer circuit flight of aviator Henri Farman. After the War, Issy resumed its role as the industrial engine of the region – but then watched its economy erode in the de-industrialization of the 1970s and 1980s. Many of the world’s great cities have industrial sub-cities like Issy, and many remain decimated by the collapse of manufacturing employment.

But the fate of Issy-les-Moulineaux was to be different, and to a greater extent than in most places, the difference was made by a single individual. In 1984, the people of Issy elected André Santini as their Mayor. Over the next nearly 40 years, his administration provided leadership that was by turns visionary, daring and enormously persistent.

Envisioning the Future

First came the vision. With its proximity to the French capital and a major Army base, Issy was already home to a small cluster of IT, telecommunications and R&D organizations. Mayor Santini came to believe that they represented the city’s future, and made it his top priority to create a business environment that would attract many more.

What would such a business environment look like? It would include the things that traditional economic development stresses: reasonable tax rates and good infrastructure, transparency and efficiency in government, access to labor and transportation. But long before it became accepted wisdom, Mayor Santini saw that would include an innovative culture comfortable with technology and adept at using it to solve problems.

As the Eighties gave way to the Nineties, the Mayor’s government made a series of investments that signaled its technology priorities. Issy became the first French city to install outdoor electronic information displays and the first to deploy a cable TV network. In 1993, schools introduced a smart card allowing pupils to pay for lunch electronically. The following year, the City Council rebuilt its meeting room for multimedia and began broadcasting Council meetings over the cable system.

In 1994, the Mayor also challenged city departments to create a comprehensive Information Plan based on study of the evolution of the Internet in the United States. The Internet was then in its infancy: 1994 was the year when Netscape, creator of the first commercial Web browser, was founded in California. Under the plan, completed in 1996, a Steering Committee representing municipal departments and elected officials was created to oversee investment in projects and maintain focus on objectives. The Steering Committee’s founding led the city to adopt the Plan Local d’Information (Local Information Plan) with the goal of transforming Issy into a “digital city.”

But policymaking was never a substitute for action. By 1995, Issy had free Internet access – with the fledgling Netscape browser and the new Internet Explorer – in its Media Library. Issy’s first version of an e-government portal was already online in 1996. By 1997, the Council added interactivity to its cable and Internet broadcast of meetings, inviting citizens to ask questions by telephone or email and get an immediate response. Public participation began to climb. Whereas few residents bothered to attend Council meetings in the past, nearly half regularly participate remotely today. In 2002, Issy created a Participative Budget-Making Platform that enables citizens to help in setting local investment priorities. (Its latest generation includes an online game for children 7 to 14 that challenges them to test their knowledge of local finances.)

Service was expanded in 2005 with the IRIS "citizen relationship management" system, through which citizens could make inquiries or lodge complaints online, via telephone, email or mail. By 2010, Issy had extended e-government to the mobile user, with mobile phone payment of parking fees and an array of mobile remote support services for the elderly. Today, the portal (www.issy.com) provides local news, online public procurement, online applications for certificates and permits, access to more than 15,000 documents, air quality and weather updates and a variety of other services.

Betting on Broadband

The Santini administration also dared to place big bets on the future. In 1998, the city made headlines by deciding to outsource its entire IT infrastructure to Euriware, a 10-year-old Paris company. The goal was to create an efficient service organization that could quickly turn ideas from municipal departments into reality. Mayor Santini promoted it as the first essential step in transforming Issy into a "digital city" as per the Local Information Plan.

The following year, the state-owned France Telecom lost its monopoly on telecommunications. The history of liberalization in telecom has been mixed at best. It has succeeded in lowering prices, particularly for long-distance service, but has failed in local markets around the world to loosen the grip of incumbents. Not so in Issy – because, well before the deadline, Mayor Santini's team launched negotiations with alternative carriers, which agreed to enter public-private partnerships with Issy to deploy networks. As a result, on the same day that the monopoly ended, Issy became the first city in France to offer businesses a choice of carriers. Over the next twenty years, as it continued to welcome competitors, Issy gained a total of six alternative broadband networks, passing 100% of businesses, government agencies, institutions and households. Issy also operates a network of 150 free WiFi access points, with speeds up to 20 Mbps, around the city. Today, 95% of Issy’s households have broadband connections, compared with the French average of 85%.

Growing Digital Services Based on Broadband Success

With a robust broadband infrastructure in place, Issy’s government has concentrated on encouraging citizens and businesses to make it an essential part of their life and work. The city’s schools have had PCs for many years now as well as a system of “mobile classes” equipped with PCs and tablets to make learning easier and more accessible. In 2015 however, Issy began deployment of the Environnement National de Travail (Digital School Platform) for all classes in the city.

The Digital School Platform allows teachers to collaborate on teaching methods, share materials and gain access to a variety of useful data from their colleagues throughout the city while also allowing parents to follow their children’s work, activities and any other matters of interest digitally. During 2016, more than 150 teachers (over half of those in the city) attended training sessions on the Digital School Platform. Issy’s 250 classrooms now each have an interactive digital projector and laptop for the teacher, allowing easy access to the Digital School Platform and all online course materials. The city has also offered Microsoft Office 356 Pro licenses to each elementary-school-aged child and each teacher in their schools to guarantee access to digital technologies outside of school and for use in school assignments. As of September 2017, all Issy primary schools have fiber optic Internet access as well.

Outside of the school system, computer training courses are provided to all ages in the Issy Media Library and the Cube, a digital arts center. Courses are also provided purely online for those who cannot easily get to the facilities in person, such as the elderly and disabled. Senior citizens can learn how to use computers and access the Internet in the familiar and comforting environment of Cyber Tearooms as well. A campaign launched in 2006 refurbishes older computers donated by business and government and provides them at affordable prices to low-income families.

An annual Cube Festival involves the public in showcasing the many facets of digital creation through digital arts exhibitions. In 2010, the Festival introduced a multimedia urban adventure game, in which players use new technologies to solve puzzles, moving back and forth between the real and the virtual worlds.

A Living Lab

Issy’s strategy envisions an “innovation triangle,” with businesses as technology facilitators, citizens as the users and the government as the initiator and coordinator of projects. Through partnership agreements with companies like Microsoft and European Union programs like Living Labs, Issy has become a test bed for new technologies. In 2008, the European Network of Living Labs granted Issy the official title of “Medialand Living Lab of Issy-les-Moulineaux.”

As a living lab, the city began testing new mobile and web applications as well as a local platform focused on mobility in 2015. Services currently being tested include an augmented reality history app and a participatory urbanism one as well. The local testers group includes 250 subscribers as of 2017 who regularly participate in pilot activities and provide feedback to the city on which services work for them and what changes can be made to further improve quality and accessibility for the populace.

One of the projects currently under testing in Issy’s Living Lab is So Mobility. The project aims to reduce traffic congestion, as Issy-les-Moulineaux lies next to Paris in the heart of a particularly dense urban metropolis. So Mobility’s priorities include installing traffic sensors to provide drivers with real-time traffic updates, developing new solutions for smart parking and testing new transport modes such as driverless shuttles and carpooling. As part of the project, Issy hosted an integrated mobility test in collaboration with the Colas, Cisco, Indigo and Transdev companies in 2017 to determine congestion and parking patterns produced by the Grand Paris Express autonomous metro project, which is currently in development. Three local startups also began offering efficient carpooling services in Issy in 2017, and the city has begun promoting such methods to many other companies in the area as a result of their success.

Staying the Course

The transformation of Issy from declining industrial district to booming tech corridor has hardly been an overnight success. Over three decades, the community has worked persistently and consistently to promote both digital business and a prosperous digital lifestyle for all of its citizens.

Issy is not a university town and has no higher education in the formal sense. But with encouragement from government, France Telecom R&D conducts training for students in the telecom sector and the community’s many IT companies are active recruiters of students for internships. Studec TV, a Grande Ecole offering continuing education for broadcasting professionals, welcomed its first students to Issy in 2009, and the Paris Bar School, which has trained more than 23,000 lawyers since 1988, moved into new offices in the city in 2011.

For decades, Mayor Santini has insisted that no segment of the population be left behind when it comes to technology. In June 2010, he joined the French Minister of Health to officially open the first rest home in France to combine leading-edge technologies and health services with architectural comfort. With its own video production studio and video-on-demand network, the Lassere Rest Home uses video to help seniors stay in touch with the world and each other. A regular “Laserre Infos” TV program, produced by a senior resident and a youngster from one of the city’s youth associations, keeps residents updated on events in the Rest Home. A series of interviews called “Petals of Life” allow 100-year-old residents to share their experiences and memories with Issy’s inhabitants.

ICF recognized Issy’s vision, daring and persistence in 2009 when it named Mayor Andre Santini its Intelligent Community Visionary of the Year. His vision has guided the city for longer than most of us have lived in the places we currently reside, and it has left Issy of the Windmills well prepared to continue prospering in the decades to come.

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Issy-les-Moulineaux was featured in the Intelligent Community Forum book Brain Gain.

Population: 67,360

Labor Force: 72,000

Website: www.issy.com/en/home

Smart21 2007 | 2009 | 2011 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020

Top7 2005 | 2007 | 2009 | 2011

The City of Besançon was founded 2,000 years ago near what is now the Swiss border. A university town and regional capital, it grew wealthy from the manufacture of clocks and watches, metallurgy, textiles and food-processing – until global competition for timepieces in the 1970s sent the economy into severe decline. The community fought back by leveraging its universities and grands écoles, where 24,000 students are enrolled, and finding new outlets for its people’s skills in precision manufacturing. Strong leadership from the city’s Mayor, and active support from citizen, business and academic groups, enabled Besançon to build a technology park devoted to microtechnology, and to become in 1994 the first French city with a fiber network connecting all government and quasi-government facilities. Every school student beginning in third grade receives a “digital schoolbag,” consisting of laptop and access to an online collaboration platform, free of charge. While broadband is widely available, Besançon has also established free digital centers in every neighborhood to ensure access. Universities and technical schools continue the focus on ICT in order to produce qualified workers for the city’s growing technology cluster. Besançon has also extended its focus outward with a “Seneclic” project, in which residents with disabilities refurbish computers for shipment to schools in Senegal.

Population: 122,000

Website: www.besancon.fr

Smart21 2010

The mobile communications business has been good to Oulu, and the mobile business has become a threat to its future.

This former industrial city located 200 km south of the Arctic Circle built a tech-based economy in the Eighties around the Nokia Research Center and numerous small-to-midsize enterprises (SMEs) specializing in mobile technologies, many located at the Oulu Technology Park.

The “Nokia risk” as Oulu’s leaders called it, materialized in the new century as the company failed to adapt to the rise of the smartphone and began to downsize its operations.  Yet Oulu has created 18,000 new high-tech jobs since 2007, thanks to a decades-old culture of public-private collaboration and its many high-quality educational institutions, including the University of Oulu with its 16,000 students.

Driving Innovation

The city has built ICT assets such as the PanOULU free wireless network – created by merging Wi-Fi infrastructure from 17 organizations to serve 25,000 users per month – and an e-government Web portal for citizens.

In collaboration with the university and business, it has fostered multiple R&D institutes from the Center for Internet Excellence to Oulu Living Labs, where a broad range of technologies are researched and developed before being tested by residents who volunteer their time and expertise.

Strategic Focus

The city’s 2007-13 Innovation Strategy stresses the importance of human enthusiasm as a source of innovation. The strategy rests on several key assumptions: that the region has ambitious businesses, that opportunities will arise from connecting them with the potential of the global market, and that services will gain an increasing role in economic growth. But there is another assumption that distinguishes Oulu from many other places. It is that citizens of all ages should be involved in business and institutional innovation.

Whatever the fortunes of its biggest mobile technology employer, Oulu is determined to be a quiet leader in the technologies that will shape our century.

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Read the latest updates about Oulu.

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Oulu was featured in the Intelligent Community Forum books Brain Gain and Seizing Our Destiny.

Population: 188,000

Labor Force: 90,000

Website: www.businessoulu.com

Smart21 2012 | 2013

Top7 2012 | 2013

Estonia saw a major boom from 2004 to 2007, as loan capital poured in from Scandinavian countries.

The country’s rise from Soviet occupation, beginning in 1991, had been miraculous, but the wave of investment was more than the market could usefully absorb. When the financial crisis came, it hit Estonia and its principal city of Tallinn very hard. Several thousand companies went bankrupt and layoffs, particularly of the low-skilled, rose into the tens of thousands.

Yet beneath the froth, Tallinn has put into place the foundations of ICT-based growth that is generating a strong comeback.

First Wave

Tallinn’s first wave of IT industry growth was driven by national government spending on an amazing range of e-government applications. Its return to growth has a more sustainable basis in education and entrepreneurship. With 23 universities and technical schools, Tallinn has the resources for a knowledge workforce; it has focused now on expanding access and filling demand for ICT and digital content skills.

From 2007 to 2011, Tallinn Technical University doubled participation in lifelong learning programs. The city is expanding public access computer sites and training programs for the disconnected, while a public-private project called EstWin will extend 100 Mbps broadband throughout Estonia by 2015.

Celebrating Education

Beginning in 2018, Tallinn has hosted an annual festival of education: iduEDU. At the festival, schools, kindergartens, and hobby schools in region share innovations and new study methods they have developed with each other and with their students' parents. Private companies often attend the festival, where they introduce new technologies that may be useful to schools and give advice on their success stories and startup challenges. These companies provide contacts in the private sector for future collaboration with the local school systems and sharing ideas on what skills will be most valuable to the future workforce. iduEDU also includes a showcase of new adult learning solutions.

Based on the success of iduEDU, Tallinn has introduced #EduInnoLab ICT Innovation Laboratories into area schools. These competence centers focus on particular areas of ICT innovation in education, seeking new ways for the government to support schools, encourage testing and implementation of innovative learning methods and share particularly innovative schools’ methods with others.

Fostering Innovation at Home

To support local startups and attract talent from beyond Estonia’s borders, Tallinn and its educational and business partners have launched multiple incubators targeting creative services, medical and biotech, mechatronics, and ICT. Europe’s first gaming accelerator opened in Tallinn this year, and its Ülemiste City industrial estate is expanding 50% to house 250 companies, making it the Baltics’ biggest knowledge-based development.

Established in 2012, Tallinn's Prototron competition aims to help new startups grow and thrive through prototype financing. Competition applicants include individuals and businesses with projects from all fields, including green tech, digitalization of industry, new materials, health-tech and fintech. Each year's winner receives 35,000€ funding for their prototype in addition to the valuable training, advice, and useful contacts they make at the event. Since its founding, Prototron has hosted a total of 64 teams with over 700,000€ awarded for prototypes.

In January 2023 Tallinn initiated a Test in Tallinn program both for domestic and international companies. Test in Tallinn is a new program, offering an attractive environment for technology providers to test their solutions in city environment with an objective to gain experience and transform their products to global success. In the year of the European Green capital 2023, Tallinn wants to introduce our city to experts in the field and to the wider world as a favorable test environment for green innovation and as a competence center at the European level, where promoters and specialists of the city development and sustainable management model work. Innovation and its promotion, including science and technology-based activities, which are also oriented to the demand of international markets, play an important role in increasing the competitiveness of the region and companies.

The city of Tallinn in cooperation with science and business park Tehnopol are hosting “Tallinnovation” competition from 2020 to find and implement smart city solutions. The competition fund is 100,000€! The amount of support per company is 30,000 euros! The goal of Tallinnovation competition is to increase the development and implementation of innovative technologies with small footprint. Supporting cooperation between the City of Tallinn and technology companies by enabling the use of innovative software or hardware products in the City of Tallinn. Support the City of Tallinn’s ambition to make the city environment more modern, sustainable and citizen-friendly. Introduce innovative smart city solutions, products, and services to the City of Tallinn. Support companies’ growth ambitions, product development and entry into foreign markets.

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Read the latest updates about Tallinn.

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Tallinn was featured in the Intelligent Community Forum book Brain Gain.

Population: 411,709

Labor Force: 230,000

Website: https://www.tallinn.ee/

Smart21 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2013 | 2020

Top7 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2013 | 2020

Intelligent Community of the Year 2020

With the collapse of Soviet rule over eastern Europe in the late 1990s, this capital city of one of the continent’s poorest countries set off on a perilous journey to the 21st Century. Tirana is the commercial and manufacturing center of the country, with about half of all Albania companies and three-quarters of foreign-owned enterprises. It is home to growing industries for footwear and clothing, agricultural products, mining, oil and gas, and tourism. With low Internet penetration compared to the European Union, the country’s Internet market offers high growth potential. In Tirana, broadband take-up is rising rapidly in response to increased availability and sharply lower prices. The nation’s goal is to become a “cyber-hub” for the region, with broadband penetration equal to that of the EU and ICT becoming a leading sector of the economy. Tirana is home to Albania’s only business incubator and has seen a corresponding increase in startups in sectors including advertising, design, computer services, media and publishing. The national development strategy focuses on expanding the small-to-midsize business base, including micro-enterprises, and fostering an entrepreneurial culture. The Albanian government has invested substantially in e-government applications and has encouraged the private sector to offer digital services to customers, such as online banking. And both Tirana and the nation are making strides: the World Bank Doing Business Indicators showed Albania advancing from 136th in 2007 to 82nd in 2010. In 2009, it achieved the second-highest rank among the top 10 reformers worldwide. Continued success will depend on implementing the right policies, successfully navigating the process of joining the European Union and making the most effective use of the resulting relationship.

Population: 400,000

Website: www.tirana.gov.al

Smart21 2013

This municipal county of 4 million has been identified by A.T. Kearny as one of two sub-Saharan cities likely to achieve developed status within 20 years. If the prediction proves true, it will mark a sharp positive turn at the end of a very long road. After its independence in 1964, Kenya gradually declined into a kleptocracy committed to embezzling public funds for personal gain. Nairobi stood out as one of most corrupt cities in East Africa. In 2007, it represented 60% of Kenyan GDP and grew its economy 6%, while nearly two-thirds of its population lived in slums. A national movement for multi-party democracy began in the late 1980s and accelerated through two tumultuous decades to culminate in approval of a new constitution in 2012. By creating the foundation of civil society, it became one of several trends building a better future for Nairobi.

Opening Up Communications

One trend was the liberalization of communications. In 1999, the country had only 300,000 landline phones and an infant mobile phone industry because the state-owned monopoly had served as a slush fund for government. The break-up of the monopoly early in the 21st Century opened the way for new entrants, among them a mobile phone operator called Safaricom.

The company introduced in 2007 a service called M-Pesa, which allows users to load money onto their phones – as they would prepaid airtime – and transfer it to another phone through a simple text message. It was introduced as a defensive measure to reduce subscriber churn. Today, it handles US$320 million in payments each month, equivalent to one-fourth of Kenya’s GDP, and is responsible for driving mobile phone penetration to nearly 70%. In the process, it has unleashed economic activity by introducing banking services to low-income citizens and spawned a host of start-ups in Nairobi. In 2012, Safaricom and the Commercial Bank of Africa introduced M-Shwari, a savings and lending program operating by phone. Within 2 years, it built a customer base of 7 million and facilitated $14 million in loans. Next on Safaricom’s agenda is construction of an inland fiber network linking to new submarine fiber landing in Mombasa.

Private and Public-Sector Progress

The beginning of a modern market economy has permitted private-sector and public-sector progress to take hold. Kenya’s leading industrialist, Manilal Chandaria, has founded a business school and incubation center at Nairobi universities, which builds on the success of the iHub tech facility established in 2010. Microsoft has partnered with Intel and a school association to bundle devices, educational applications, affordable data plans and financing in Nairobi’s 4Afrika Youth Device Program. The national government’s Vision 2030 development plan has put major emphasis on introducing ICT into education. If present trends continue and gain greater momentum, Nairobi may achieve the coveted goal of developed status sooner than anyone expects.

Population: 3,375,000

Website: www.nairobi.go.ke

Smart21 2014 | 2015 | 2019

The Nelson Mandela Bay (NMB) metro area includes Port Elizabeth and surrounding coastal cities. The automotive sector is its top employer, but NMB aims to develop an ICT-based sector in call centers, IT outsourcing and related businesses, and to use ICT to reduce huge disparities in education and income. NMB has a detailed plan for deploying wireless and FTTP broadband, introducing e-government and bridging the digital divide. As of November 2007, the community had completed a 100 Mb wireless network connecting government facilities, which is generating immediate savings. Next on the list is using the network to improve control of traffic, a first for South Africa, as a public demonstration of ICT. NMB's approach is worthy of imitation, because it creates a bold strategy and high-quality plan but sets realistic expectations for achieving it within the community's means.

Population: 1,200,000

Website: www.nmbt.co.za

Smart21 2009

The first South African entry to ICF’s list of 21 has thriving ICT, media and call center industries supporting a community of 3.2 million where the digital divide is great. In 2002, only 14% of the population had Internet access. A new fiber network is anticipated to create and establish 250,000 jobs.

Population: 3,300,000

Website: www.capetown.gov.za

Smart21 2008

On Christmas Day of 2014, Taiwan lost a county and gained a city, when the county of Taoyuan changed to municipal status. Its proximity to the Taipei Metropolitan Area has led to major investments in such public utilities as Taiwan’s largest international airport and the 2017 Taoyuan MRT Airport Line, which speeds connections between the city’s high-speed rail station and the airport.  These, in turn, have driven rapid development in Taoyuan City, which has attracted a large number of new residents from other cities and countries. 

Taoyuan is the largest industrial science and technology city in Taiwan. More than one-third of Taiwan’s top 500 manufacturing industries have set up factories in Taoyuan. The industrial output value of about 2.87 trillion NTD has led all Taiwanese cities for 14 consecutive years. The population is a fusion of many ethnic groups such as Minnan, Hakka and Aboriginal people.  Because of the industrial development, Taoyuan is also the municipality with the largest number of foreign workers from Southeast Asia and the largest number of Vietnamese new residents.

Broadband Services for All

Taoyuan initiated the i-Taoyuan Free Wi-Fi 2.0 project in 2016 to optimize the city’s existing wireless network services and expand the city’s free network environment of hotspots. As of 2019, the project has established 5,000 free wireless hotspots throughout the city with plans in place to expand four high-traffic areas into hot zones with wider coverage. Chunghwa Telecom has set up its own network of 5,236 CHT Wi-Fi hotspots with 400 access points as well, distributed in all public areas for use by the general populace. In addition to setting up hotspots, Taoyuan has worked with local providers Taoyuan City Telefirst Cable Communication Co., Ltd., North Taoyuan Cable TV Co., Ltd. and South Taoyuan Cable TV Co., Ltd. to ensure that broadband service is available across the entire city.

With Internet access available so widely in the city, Taoyuan has developed the Smart District and Village System. The system connects 13 districts and 495 villages and neighborhoods in Taoyuan City with the city’s many government departments, allowing citizens to access up-to-date transit information and providing local businesses with an online platform to offer their mobile services. Taoyuan is also introducing smart parking and location systems to car parks in those districts and has deployed a dynamic information system for the city’s buses. Taoyuan Metro now provides free 4G and WiFi coverage and smart services as well.

Taoyuan is also currently working on an Internet of Things demonstration site for Taiwan. Asia Pacific Telecom has established 90 LoRa hotspots in the city to support Taiwan’s first Internet of Things dual network. The network is expected to cover all of Taiwan in the near future.

Youth Entrepreneurship in Qingpu

To further develop its youth talent, Taoyuan has created the Youth Entrepreneurship Headquarters in Qingpu. The Headquarters hosts a series of innovation- and entrepreneurship-themed courses for local youth as well as courses in the application of technology in new industry. As of 2016, the Headquarters has reached 441 members, 933 stationed members, and 17 teams of instructors.

The Taoyuan city government has established another entrepreneurship headquarters in the Taoyuan Youth Commander, which is the city’s first co-working maker space. As a startup hub, the Taoyuan Youth Commander provides clients with professional consultation and other services to help new ventures get off the ground and learn the fundamentals of business and marketing. The maker space also aids entrepreneurs in finding partners for their projects both within Taiwan and overseas. As of 2017, Taoyuan has planned an additional three national-level bases for young entrepreneurs: Hotuoshan IoT New Venture Hub, Chung Yuan Entrepreneurship Village and Young Maker Co-working Park.

The city has also partnered with local colleges to add more entrepreneurial courses. National Central University in Taoyuan has established the Foreign Language Talent and Smart Industry Incubation Center to connect local students with international students and entrepreneurs.

Creating an Innovation Hub

With its location between Taipei and Hsinchu, Taoyuan is perfectly placed to be an innovation and business hub in Taiwan. The city is home to the largest cluster of logistics companies in Taiwan, including many supermarkets, hypermarkets, retailers and fresh food suppliers. To provide broader logistical support to new industries, Taoyuan has developed the Taoyuan Aerotropolis and has established the only airport free trade zone in Taiwan. The city has also created an Innovation and R&D Centre to provide further resources and services to new and established companies.

Connecting all of these developments to the rest of Taiwan is essential for the innovation hub. The Taoyuan city government has established a comprehensive network of buses in the city with a total of 261 routes, many of which now sport dynamic information systems that provide useful data to travelers. In addition to the bus system, Taoyuan is connected to Taipei and Hsinchu via high speed rail, MRT, highways and the Taoyuan International Airport MRT. The city has outfitted all of these routs with 4G wireless coverage to allow travelers to work, research or relax while in transit.

Providing Knowledge and Access to Services through the Citizen Identity Card

Taoyuan launched a citizen identity card called the Taoyuan City Card in 2015 as a means of connecting its residents with a wide variety of public services and information. The card is integrated with many of the city’s transportation systems, serving as a ticket for busses, MRT, the Taiwan Railway, and even as a means to rent a bicycle. It may also be used to pay parking and most other government fees, as a municipal library card and even as a meeting attendance card for citizens to better keep track of their schedules.

In addition to city services, the Taoyuan City Card also provides citizens with discounts at over 700 stores offering hospitality and tourism services as well as local sports and fitness centers, youth centers and public halls and the Taoyuan Municipal Swimming Pool. The card is linked to a holder’s sports history for the sake of providing doctors with additional information during medical exams, and the city plans to integrate with cards with the national health insurance system in the future to provide citizens with easy access to their medical records in the future.

Taoyuan has issued roughly 1 million cards to citizens as of 2019. The cards grant discounts in more than 1,000 locations, including 742 stores participating in the program. In the future, the city plans to expand services to include banking, mobile payment services, telecommunication, and electronic tickets.

Alternative Energy in Taoyuan

To build a sustainable future, Taoyuan City has been heavily investing in solar energy. The city leases roof space of public houses to establish solar generation systems, with 132 government-owned buildings outfitted as of 2017, generating a total of 12 million kwh of electricity annually. With the assistance of the Tatung Company, Taoyuan will be building 200 public housing developments with solar generation capacity, aiming to produce 20 million kwh of electricity per year.

The city is working with businesses to improve solar energy production as well. The Department of Environmental Projects in Taoyuan has introduced an energy service company to provide free installation of solar generation equipment on the rooftops of factories as well as public housing.

In addition to solar energy, Taoyuan is also focusing on wind power generation. Since 2011, 57 wind power plants have been installed in Guanyin and Luzhu. The city is also planning a number of offshore wind plants in the coming years.

By nourishing local innovation, attracting international entrepreneurs, and building an ever-growing infrastructure for clean energy production, Taoyuan is preparing its people, organizations and environment for global competition.

In the News
Read the latest updates about Taoyuan City.

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Taoyuan City was featured in the Intelligent Community Forum book Brain Gain.

Population: 2,215,615

Website: www.tycg.gov.tw/eng

Intelligent Community of the Year 2019

Smart21 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019

Top7 2013 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019

Taitung is Taiwan’s third-largest county by area and home to 224,000 people. Spread across the mountainous southeast coast of the island, it was a thinly-populated economic backwater through most of the 20th Century, while the northwest coastal plains became the center of Taiwan’s remarkable economic rise. Agriculture and tourism are its dominant industries. Because it was the last region of Taiwan settled by the Han Chinese in the 19th Century, it has also retained much aboriginal culture, which makes its own contribution to tourism.

Smart Infrastructure

Like most isolated rural regions, the county was underserved by broadband – until county government engaged in a major drive to deploy wireless infrastructure. Through negotiation, persuasion and investment, the county accomplished what seemed impossible: deployment of 250 hotspots in just over four months to achieve 100% availability for residents and businesses. County leaders recognized, however, that deployment was only the beginning. It set up a major public education program and a 24-hour hotline to help people get online. The effort succeeded: calls to the hotline gradually declined from 200 per month to single digits and public satisfaction reached nearly 80% in a 2015 survey. By September 2015, there were more than 100,000 subscribers to the “TT-Free” service in a county with a population of only 224,000. Vision Magazine placed Taitung County at the top of its list of counties for “smart infrastructure.”

Boosting Local Industry

The county was quick to put the network to use for economic development. It created a Smart Travel Service Plan that aggregated its own data with third-party services like TripAdvisor in a single mobile portal available on the app stores in multiple languages. It also helped six major tourist sites to install systems that generate constantly updated guide maps and navigation tips that can be pushed to the phones of tourists. One of the county’s biggest events is a hot air balloon festival, which attracted 350,000 tourists in 2011. Just one year later, attendance jumped to 830,000. The major tour sites of Taitung received six million visitors in 2013, up 44% from 2009. While the number of hotels grew, the average occupancy rate also leaped to third in the nation. Developments like these caused the outflow of population from the county to reverse for the first time in years in 2014.

The county also has a long cultural and industry legacy in woodworking. Working with industry, universities, researchers and the national government, it is now planning a Maker Park to help entrepreneurs apply technology to launch innovative woodworking businesses.

New Model for Service Delivery

The network also helps Taitung County better serve residents and businesses. There was once only one county office, located in the city of Taitung, to which many residents had to travel long distances. Through the network, the county has made available more than 200 services online and provides access at 15 township offices. County staff even go to the homes of elderly and disabled residents with tablets to deliver services and information. During typhoon season, prevailing winds blow from the south, which puts Taitung County on the front lines. To help with disaster preparation, the county has created a real-time decision support system that mines data on past typhoons to help predict where incoming storms will have the greatest impact, so that emergency resources can be pre-positioned where they will do the most good.

The county’s experience illustrates vividly how rural areas can use broadband and information technology to overcome the traditional barriers of distance and isolation and find new economic relevance in the broadband economy.

Population: 224,470

Website: www.taitung.gov.tw/en

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