ITU organized a Forum: " Innovative Digital Solutions for an Accessible Europe: Fostering Growth of Start-ups", in Vienna, Austria, as part of the Zero Project Conference, on 21 February 2019 from 16:25 to 17:55 in room M2, Building M, UN Office Vienna.
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have a vital role for ALL people's empowerment and represent an enabler for inclusion in the society. For persons with disabilities (PwD) accessible innovative digital solutions remove barriers and help PwD to have an independent life. The innovative solutions often emanate from start-ups which need to prove the effectiveness and uniqueness of their products or services which should be promoted to the relevant users at an affordable price.
Two ITU Regional Initiatives for Europe namely on ICT Accessibility for PwD and on ICT Centric Innovation Ecosystems converge to address the concrete implementation of innovative ICT Accessibility solutions to ensure that access and use ICTs by PwDs, are the same as for other citizens in Europe region.
This session explored what is needed to build an ecosystem supporting innovative ICT Accessibility solutions. It was designed to act as a combined interactive panel discussion and training session, sharing experiences and providing a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities in developing Accessible ICT solutions and the enabling innovation and entrepreneurial environment.
The objectives of the ITU Forum were:
- To present three Innovative Digital Solutions for an Accessible Europe which emerged as the winner and runners up of a competition organized by ITU in collaboration with the European Commission in December 2018
- To provide an understanding of ITU's toolkit for fostering growth for Start-ups and the development of ecosystems nurturing them
- To demonstrate how to effectively apply some approaches and tools from the ITU innovation toolkit through a power training exercise for participants
Our session has been facilitated by Mr. Mohamed Ba, Head of Innovation, ITU
Speakers were:
- Mr Masahito Kawamori, ITU-T Q26/16 Rapporteur, Keio University, Japan
- Mr Lorenzo Di Ciaccio, Founder & CEO, Pedius
- Ms Natalia Amelina, UNESCO
- Mr Željko Khermayer, founder and CEO, Feelif
