🇸🇮 Digital Innovation Hub Slovenia

About this hub

Digital Innovation Hub Slovenia (DIHS) is a national non-profit one-stop-shop dedicated to digital transformation of SME to provide, connect and support knowledge, business and technology expertise, technologies, experimental and pilot environments, best practices, methodologies and other activities necessary to fully enable Slovene industry in building digital competencies, innovation models and processes, support their digital transformation and raise their competitive advantages based on digital. DIHS is a private non-profit institute, founded by Chamber of Commerce and Industry Slovenia and operates with the help of strategic partners: University of Maribor, Tecos, Technology Park Ljubljana, International Institute of Business Analysis Slovenia, Smart Factories Cluster and Wood Industry Cluster. This multi-sector and multi-discipline partnership establishan ecosystem to sustainably support its vision on a short and long term. DIH covers three most important pillars of digital transformation: education, industry (SMEs) and municipalities, and is unique in its comprehensive lifelong learning approach. DIHS is located in Ljubljana, Slovenia, but operating on national level with international potential for collaboration. The knowledge areas of DIHS are: - Competence: Digital competence development. - Transformation: Joint development of services to support digital transformation in companies. - Innovation and Innovation labs: Promoting open innovation, designing new business models. - Prototypes: Experimental and pilot environments. - International: Transfer of good practices and collaboration with other DIH in the EU. - Support: Provide support to businesses in managing their digital transformation. DIH Slovenia focuses on 4 main areas: 1. Setting up and managing the ecosystem DIHS strives to support existing networks and serves as an upgraded national platform. DIHS started to analyse and map the needs of our beneficiaries (mainly SMEs) as well as locate what does the current market offer (quantity and quality of supply). Through mentorship DIHS further strengthens and speeds up the process of digitalization within SME, industry, education and local public sector. Through these initial steps we will have the complete overview of tools and data for forecasting the digital profiles of future skills needs. Based on the mentioned, DIHS will prepare recommendations for Academia to encourage new departments for future students, based on needs of digital economy. Next to research activities, DIHS will also focus on active collaboration of all stakeholders for business and digital societal development, but most of all, offer a space for business prototyping and experimenting. 2. Professional support with digital competence development This activity includes creating a catalogue of digital competences, based on the feedback from activities from first section, with noting the DigComp framework. Besides that, DIHS will offer support with creating 4-year long plans to develop digital competences within SME sector and also to mentor SME's in the process of making digital business plans. 3. Extended regional and international collaboration and connectivity Cooperating with EU DIH network and individual DIHS, exchanging best-practices within region and internationally. DIHS will further strive to enrolin networks of various EU stakeholders and beyond. All this will be visual through a shared online platform, where everybody will have the right to contribute (share their best-practice, lesson learned, etc.). We will also offer support to business and development partnerships to strengthen collaboration in global value chains of Slovenian industry. 4. Promotional activities and empowerment DIHS focuses on promotion and raising awareness on the importance of digital technologies and digital transformation, and in this way, mentorships and partnerships will play the key role for regional, national and European policy initiatives for industry digitalization. By doing so, DIHS is organizing various conferences, promotional events and campaigns, and strive to gain positive media exposure on the topics covered by DIHS. In 2021 DIHS organized over 140 events, all on the topic of digitalization. DIHS’ end goal is to increase the level of business and societal mindset on digitalization, digital transformation and innovation. Altogether, DIHS has access to over 3000 SMEs in all regions of Slovenia. We also work with other support environments in Slovenia, offering various products and services for digitalization. Besides DIHS activities, DIHS will also try to provide access to funding opportunities for SMEs, and develop innovation ecosystem for participating stakeholders. Our mission is to accelerate digital transformation in Slovenia in multi-layered view, starting with SME, industry, business and education. DIHS provides access to best practices and create environment for growth of digital skills and understanding on technology benefits. Therefore, DIHS offers customer-oriented approach, where not only facilitating change-process, but also providing support for a higher digital maturity of SMEs and other business players, education sector and municipalities as we consider digital society coherently.