As part of the LEMGO DIGITAL initiative, the Fraunhofer IOSB-INA will expand the downtown of the Old Hanseatic City into an open living lab. The goal is to create digital innovations for everyday life based on the Internet of Things (IoT). This makes Lemgo the IoT reference platform for medium-sized cities, which is used by researchers, government and industry together with citizens. The boundary conditions in Lemgo and the existing Fraunhofer competence in the area of the Internet of Things provide the ideal framework conditions for the project.
Mittelstädte: With a size between 20,000 and 100,000 inhabitants, they are home to half of all inhabitants in NRW. Lemgo falls in the middle of this category. Due to its manageable size and short decision-making paths, Lemgo is predestined to comprehensively address the issue of digitization in the city.
The Infrastructure can then be used by companies, IoT startups, communities and research institutes to work with citizens to develop and test new products and data-based services. The goal is to permanently establish this system beyond the funding phase, because this innovation approach is of great interest to companies. Further Mittelstädte are invited for participation: From the beginning, other interested municipalities are invited to a user group in order to be actively involved in shaping this process and to be able to quickly adapt the results.
Professor Jürgen Jasperneite, head of the Fraunhofer IOSB-INA and initiator of LEMGO DIGITAL, is convinced of the potential: "The Old Hanseatic City of Lemgo is a blueprint for more than 180 Mittelstädte in North Rhine-Westphalia, where half of all people live in the most densely populated federal state. We would be very happy if we could show with Lemgo Digital that centuries of tradition in our cities and open innovation are not contradictory. "