The Smart society
We live in the society of Smart: smart watches, smart beds, smart phones, TVs, the list goes on. However, I bet you hadn´t considered that cities can be smart too.
A smart city implements intelligent solutions to better the way it functions and the way it interacts and engages with its citizens. We are talking about sensors, data collection, traffic flow, energy recycling and many more characteristics that help improve how the city operates and work to constantly enhance the life of its residents.
The world is slowly but surely (or maybe not so slowly) becoming one giant city. According to the UN, 68% of the global population will live in cities by 2050. This will inevitably cause tech start-ups of all sorts to direct their focus to projects that can be inserted in this worldwide trend.
Now, I don´t know about you, but if I were one of these start-ups I would look for a small location that can be the lab for testing value propositions and get customer feedback on all kind of things that an island can offer better than any other place, since it’s a small territory with scarce resources: sustainable tourism, climate resilience, environmental sustainability, desalination, architecture, waste management, renewable energies and so on.
The Canary Islands as a test market
To round it up, the Spanish archipelago offers the lower corporate tax in Europe (4%), a highly qualified workforce with over 1.000 STEM graduates every year, a multicultural environment (over 10% of the population is foreign) and second to none weather all year round.
All these are excellent ingredients for start-ups that are into smart cities and making business experiments in an island (or islands in this case). Smart cities work to make the lives of everyone in them better and the Canary Islands are great at exactly that.