TESTBED in Riga

Rīga is the smart choice for your innovations, offering a distinctive environment for developing and piloting new technologies, policies and sustainability initiatives. With its unique blend of historical and modern infrastructure, Rīga provides a comprehensive urban landscape ideal for real-world testing. Choose Rīga as your testbed for innovation, where the city itself becomes your partner in developing impactful solutions for the city of tomorrow.

Rīga is open to innovation, offering a dynamic urban environment for the development and testing of new technologies. The city actively promotes sustainable and inclusive growth by fostering innovation and improving the everyday lives of its residents. New solutions can be tested within designated pilot areas, and innovators are encouraged to explore the city’s strategic priorities to ensure alignment with Rīga’s development vision and real needs. As part of its smart city journey, Rīga has already launched more than 30 pilot projects, testing innovative solutions that directly support its key smart city development priorities.

To facilitate the testing of various solutions in the urban environment, three pilot areas have currently been established in Rīga:

The VEF neighbourhood;
The University of Latvia Academic Centre in Torņakalns,
The Riga Technical University campus in Ķīpsala.

However, not every innovative solution or technology can be tested within one of these three pilot areas. This is often due to specific requirements that existing locations cannot accommodate—for example, the need for a certain level of water or noise pollution, a park area, a specific type of road surface, or access to particular modes of public transport. In such cases, Rīga offers the possibility to use the entire city territory as a testbed, selecting the most suitable testing site for each project individually. This flexible approach allows for testing even outside the designated pilot areas, ensuring optimal conditions for innovation and real-world experimentation.

How?

Rīga offers various types of collaboration opportunities – cooperation in EU projects, through ecosystem partners activities, direct cooperation, and cooperation through open calls.

To access the advantages of Rīga testbed, it is important to address the city’s challenges that align with Rīga’s priorities. All the activities and solutions have to contribute to sustainable growth and a higher quality of life for the inhabitants.

It is possible to express interest in cooperation on smartriga.lv providing a clear description of the solution, technological readiness level and the desired test results. The Smart Rīga team will review the application based on the following process:

If the proposed solution corresponds to the necessary criteria, Smart Rīga team will help with the deployment process by contributing to use-case development, suitable location assignment, coordination process amongst various stakeholders involved in the deployment process.

The solutions can be deployed and tested for up to one year.

Piloting costs, if not stated otherwise, are not covered by the city.

Smart Rīga offers the opportunity to use the city as a testbed to develop and deploy solutions, but it does not include the guarantee for procurement.

TESTBED in Riga

Why Rīga?

Infrastructure and Data Access

Point of Contact

Fast Track Deployment

Access to the innovation ecosystem

Feedback and Lessons Learned for All

Collaboration opportunities in projects

Test Before Scale

How?

About us

Priorities

Projects