SMARTCITY TAIPEI

In order to transform Taipei into a smart city, Taipei City Government established “Taipei Smart City Project Management Office” on March, 2016. The main appeal is to guide public-private partnership and public participation and hoping to help the government introduce the latest smart city solutions. To transform Taipei to be a living lab, this action allows innovative technologies to be experimented in Taipei and let citizens access to many intelligent services.

Taipei Smart City Project Management Office plans Taipei smart city both from top-down and bottom-up approaches. The top-down approach is originated from a professional staff team in Taipei City Government. They give professional opinions based on collecting international smart city cases and studying world trends. They assist the bureaus in assessing the feasibility of the program and implementing the concept and direction of the smart city. For example, Taipei Station intelligent service, intelligent transportation 3U plan, smart public housing project, smart shezidao project, Taipei Science and Technology Park action plan. In addition, a main task is to introduce central government resources, integrate central and local production capacities to implement central policies into local developments.

The bottom-up approach is that using TPMO as a matching platform for gathering creativity, resource, and fields and match teams, communities, and startups with experimental fields. It also helps private sector to connect necessary resources to reach commercial production capability and large scale and further to achieve the goal of increasing effectiveness of the government. In addition, TPMO also collects needs from the public, communities and NPO groups and eagerly seek for smart technology solutions and make them to be able to meets those requirements. Since it established 9 months ago, TPMO has been successfully collaborated with the Department of Information Technology to match different fields for developing smart services. Some examples are; a co-project with Department of Cultural Affairs, the Tataocheng AR & VR touring allows citizens go back to the 1930s and feel the difference of past and present. The UAV smart disaster relief project that was co-worked with Taipei City Fire Department for earning more rescuing time. An 18-language instant translation service that was co-developed with Department of Information and Tourism will help foreign participants easily visit Taipei during the Universiade 2017. An innovative IoT Lab that is cooperated with Department of Economic Development is good for new development of convenient services for the public. There are total of over 31 potential cases in progress now. TPMO helps to find supporting private companies for these cases in order to help all bureaus to response citizen’s needs more quickly and help solution providers to bring in suitable services and do trials in proper fields as soon as possible.

Other than those implementation of applications and services and empirical process, the marketing part also have fruitful achievements both at home and aboard; including organizing many press conferences and online PR activities to let citizens acquire knowledges about smart services, and entering the communities and holding symposiums with the municipal government. Moreover, we try to connect with world famous smart cities to build good communication channels; such as Eindhoven, Amsterdam, NYC, and London …etc. Exchanging ideas online in order to share experience, and solve problems. Step by step, we continue the efforts to make Taipei become a brand of smart city in Asia. After then, we will participate in major world exhibitions to market our successful cases internationally.

This year, TPMO and Department of Information Technology worked together and had many achievements. In the future, hopefully there are more good innovative services developed through our matching platform. Because of constantly increasing cooperation with innovative service providers, new technologies will improve people’s lives and bring happiness. Through efforts of Public-private partnership, we build a new city culture in where people are happy to create, brave on change, eager to experiment and not afraid of Failure, so to let Taipei become a model of smart city.