The Alicante Water Museum hosted this Tuesday the presentation of the second installment of the digital magazine Dinapsis Digital Paper, with the participation of the author of this monograph on “Cities and innovation”, Esteve Almirall, full professor of the Department of Operations, Innovation and Data Sciences and director of the Center for Innovation in Cities at ESADE, as well as a recognized international expert in information technology. The magazine is available for download from today, through the website www.dinapsis.es.

“Cities are the crucible of innovation. The industrial revolution and all modern innovation processes take place in cities. The local government’s agenda has long focused on the provision of basic services.

Today, the need to grow with a type of economy that generates the degree of well-being and the type of work to which modern societies aspire, added to the fact that innovation is largely digital and does not need large spaces, has returned that leading role in innovation to the city”, declared Professor Almirall during his presentation.

The act has had the participation of Javier Díez, general director of Aguas de Alicante; Mª del Carmen from Spain, Councilor for Employment and Development, and Investment Office of the Alicante City Council; and Antonio Sánchez Zaplana, head of Transformación de Aguas de Alicante, along with twenty experts in innovation belonging to different organizations and institutions in the province of Alicante, who attended the Alicante Water Museum in person. Close to two hundred people interested in urban innovation have also followed the broadcast on the Dinapsis YouTube channel.

In the second part of the conference, Professor Almirall was joined by urban planner Pablo Sánchez-Chillón, an expert in Public Law, City Planning, Urban Diplomacy and Public Affairs, for a dialogue between the two on the role of innovation in our cities and the challenges they currently face, and how this innovation is articulated in the structure of the city.

Dinapsis Digital Paper is a digital magazine that collects the latest and most disruptive technological trends and the projects in which they materialize, with a special focus on the vision of a digital transformation for sustainability and the ecological transition of cities, all of this , with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of life of its inhabitants.

Promoted by Dinapsis, the network of digital transformation centers of the Agbar group for water management, environmental health and the ecological transition of the territories, the Dinapsis Digital Paper magazine forms part of this network’s commitment to innovation as an essential pillar of your activity. From the Dinapsis hubs distributed throughout Spain, new ways are sought to improve the environment of cities, from an open innovation perspective that encourages collaboration between entities, companies and startups in the search for solutions to the urban challenges of the 21st century.

As declared by the General Director of Aguas de Alicante during the opening of the conference, “Aguas de Alicante hosts this event within the framework of its Strategic Plan for 2022-2027, which is the result of actively listening to strategic actors for the company. The company’s new roadmap includes the opening of the Water Intelligence Center at the end of 2022, a new center associated with the Dinapsis network.”

Located in the city of Alicante, this new center will be integrated, in turn and for the field of water management, within the municipal strategic initiative “Alicante Futura”, aimed at structuring the master lines of the future of the city of Alicante; of the city digitization project, «Alicante Smart City 2.0»; and will be part of the initiatives of the “Alicante 2030 Urban Agenda”.