Rijeka Innovation Living Lab

About Us

Rijeka Innovation Living Lab.

The Faculty of Economics and Business in Rijeka has organised RiILL’s wide research agenda into seven agile laboratories. Each lab functions as an open-innovation sandbox where academics, students, companies, public authorities, and citizens co-create, prototype and test solutions in real-life environments.
1. Smart & Resilient Cities Lab – Focuses on urban resilience, smart-city services and data-driven governance. Teams build digital twins for crisis management, run participatory-budgeting pilots and develop decision dashboards that help Rijeka prepare for climate shocks.
2. Smart Learning & Well-being Lab – Rethinks education and quality of life in the digital era. Researchers experiment with AI tutors, immersive XR classrooms and behavioural-insight studies that boost student mental health and community wellbeing.
3. Data, AI & IoT Engineering Lab – Harvests, integrates and governs data at scale for public value. Projects include sensor networks in the port, privacy-preserving data spaces and Croatian-language large-language models for municipal chatbots.
4. Digital Transformation & Innovation 2.0 Lab – Accelerates the twin digital-and-innovation shift of regional firms and institutions. The lab runs SME digital-maturity audits, GovTech proof-of-concepts and an annual “City Challenge” hackathon pairing start-ups with civic problems.
5. Regenerative & Circular Economy Lab – Embeds circular, restorative thinking in local value chains. Blue-bio-economy pilots, zero-waste tourism sprints and finance models for regenerative business all sit under this banner.
6. Green Deal & Sustainable Europe Lab – Aligns city action with EU climate and sustainability goals. Workstreams cover net-zero road-mapping for utilities, ESG-taxonomy training for finance actors and support for Horizon-Europe consortia.
7. Public-Interest Technology Lab – Ensures technology serves democracy, equity and fundamental rights. The lab develops ethical-AI toolkits, runs digital-rights clinics for citizens and advises policymakers on trustworthy tech standards.
Across all seven labs, RiILL uses rapid co-creation workshops, living pilots that run for three- to twelve-month cycles, and continuous feedback loops that feed research results into university curricula, SME mentoring and city strategies. By clustering twelve priority topics into these seven focused laboratories, RiILL remains broad in vision yet sharp in execution—helping Rijeka and the wider Adriatic region thrive in the green-and-digital decade ahead.

Introduction

Directions and Plans for Future.

Although the term business model is usually applied in the context of entrepreneurial firms, it also has value in understanding how university driven company can convert technological potential into economic value. We have to educate our personnel on business models, so that the researchers can understand the potential connections early on in the research process. Although we have research human resources understanding this issue , this is critical success factor for us. Knowing the local market and the value proposition we have to construct the value chain that will deliver these elements including the added value. The value chain has to create value throughout the chain (delivering that value to the customer at the end of the chain), and it must allow the companies, included in research with us, to claim some sufficient portion of value from the chain to justify their participation. Key factors for sustaining competitive success should include the ability to gain differential access to key resources, the creation of internal processes that are valuable to customers and difficult for competitors to imitate, and the past experience and future momentum of the firm in the market. Plans for the future include even better international cooperation, as Croatia entered the EU. In bigger environment we have to seek similar organization to create value chain for future projects. We are strongly commited to our positition credo that only cooperation is creating value. .

Our Mission