Atlantic Innovation Region

The WDC’s remit covers the seven counties primarily on the Atlantic coast of Ireland: Donegal, Leitrim, Sligo, Roscommon, Mayo, Galway, and Clare. Its strategic themes for 2019-2024 are: i) Regional Promotion, ii) Regional Leadership, and iii) Sustainable Enterprise. The WDC’s role is that of an Orchestrator that enables this region to stimulate new social/business, innovations, partnerships, initiate experiments, and Living Labs, and foster a vibrant ecosystem across the region with global links and recognition. The most important characteristic of the AIR Living lab is the network it creates for multiple actors to come together to test innovative solutions to societal problems. Using a quadruple helix approach, the Lab acts as an orchestrator to bring together cross-cutting competencies in creativity, data, sensors, and mobility to tackle emerging challenges in vertical industries such as healthcare, energy generation, and transport. Network allows the actors to work with industry, Academia and civic society in a way that combines local knowledge and sectoral expertise to identify challenges and to source partners to solve these challenges. The Lab is also linked to the WDC Investment Fund, providing a path to scaling for successful start-up ideas that emerge from experiments. Furthermore, because the Lab is virtual, it is scalable, builds on existing resources and does not compete with existing actors but complements them and develops synergies.

Areas of work:

• Emerging Technologies (e.g. AI, AR/VR)
• Energy
• Health and Well Being
• Mobility
• Smart Cities and Regions
• SME and Start-ups
• Social Innovation and Inclusion