SofiaLab

SofiaLab is an Urban Living Lab – a Smart City community infrastructure and ecosystem, promoting urban innovations and local development by bringing together leading actors from public administration, academia, industry, and social organisations. The unique feature of SofiaLab is that it is a means for the development and implementation of Sofia Smart Specialisation Strategy which has the concept of Smart City in the core. SofiaLab is the hub of many Living Lab nodes in the city. It aims to establish an experimentation and makerspace to motivate further piloting of digital innovations within the smart city context. SofiaLab aims to encourage bottom-up idea generation, open innovation, and value co-creation at the centre of its maker space for active experimentation and pilot testing. SofiaLab hosts countless events and social activities such as awareness campaigns, community workshops and trainings, hackathons, research and innovation, start-up acceleration, social events, digital technologies camps, venture capital related events, technology transfer and company matchmaking and others.

Areas of work:

• Circular Economy
• Culture & Creativity (creative sectors)
• Education and/or vocational training
• Environment/climate change
• Regulatory learning
• Research
• Smart Cities & Regions
• SME & Start-ups
• Social Innovation & Inclusion
• Urban
• Zero pollution & decarbonization