Good practice:

Digital Innovation Hub Slovenia

DIH Slovenia is an Industry Digital Transformation one-stop-shop serving Slovenia and beyond. It creates awareness and provide services to grow digital competencies, share digital experience and case studies locally, regionally and internationally. Additionally, it aims to influence the government to adapt regulation and open public administration data to foster entrepreneurship.
Slovenia is lagging behind in the digital era. It is below the EU average in DESI. The most concerning fact is we are lagging behind particularly in the field of digital competences. Moreover, there is a danger that 27% of Slovenian jobs will disappear due to digitalisation and automation.
The aim of the operation is to become a single entry point for digitization and digital transformation, in particular through the following activities:
- Creating a digital ecosystem
- Direct support to SMEs (mentoring)
- Integration at national and EU level
- Promotion of digitization
- Overcoming the barriers to digital transformation
- Raising the digital economy index in Slovenia
- Increasing the number of companies involved in global value chains
- Raising the competitiveness of the Slovenian economy.

DIH Slovenia provides, connects and supports knowledge, business, 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.

2.6m EUR of funding for the period 1.1.2019 till 23.04.2023 from ERDF. There are 7 employees in the organisation, 3.5 full time equivalents. Memberships from key funding strategic partners.

The success of this good practice is embodied in the active strategic partnership of 14 key partners that shape the focus on specific solutions to support the Slovenian business environment. Cumulatively, in this period, 945 business organisations were directly involved with DIH Slovenia and financed to enhance their digital transformation pathway.

Critical challenges include shifting operational focus and workload to a particular domain (e.g. predominant business sector support) and managing the expectations of membership paying strategic partners while following a broader strategic vision.

We believe that our experience and lessons learnt during the whole process – designing the idea about the DIH, creating the concept, selecting the right partners, presenting the idea to the managing authorities, getting the funding, building the team, positioning the newly established organisation on the market, building the trust among the companies, can be useful for other regions willing to establish and run DIH in their environment.