Malta Digital Cluster launched at Malta Life Sciences Park

The Malta Digital Cluster was launched at the Malta Life Sciences Park by Life Sciences CEO Ing. Joseph Sammut and Edwin Ward, chairman of Paragon Europe. The role of the cluster is to create collaboration between academia, researchers, private sector entities and the public sector to take advantage of growth and new opportunities in digital.

The Malta Digital Cluster is housed at the Malta Life Sciences Park and will become a member of the European Cluster Collaboration Platform. Members of the Malta Digital Cluster will have the opportunity of joining the EU ecosystem of digital clusters to network, share best practice in a European and global context, find partners and financing, as well as identify funding programmes, research funding opportunities and EUfunded projects in which the cluster members can participate.

The Malta Digital Cluster was introduced by Malta Life Sciences Park CEO Ing. Sammut. Ing. Sammut explained how the Digital Hub contributes to attracting foreign direct investment and bringing new kinds of digital businesses to Malta.

Mr Ward added that this is an opportunity to make Malta’s digital business more competitive for cluster members to collaborate and to grow the digital industry further.

Mr Ward outlined some of the larger EU-funding programmes such as Horizon2020 (H2020) which have a wide variety of funds available for digital projects such as ICT, IoT, cybersecurity, big-data, cloud and storage. Significant funds are also available for applications development and ICT projects. Within Big-Data alone more than €2.5 billion has just been released via H2020 to cover data visualisation software and devices, data analysis infrastructure, data processing infrastructure, data storage infrastructure as well as transport and network infrastructure. A further €2.5 billion has just been made available for Research Infrastructures under the Excellent Science programme.

The Malta Digital Cluster will be networked with international partners from blue-chip digital companies, leading universities and digital clusters elsewhere in the EU and beyond. There are many international donors, the EU, NATO, the World Bank, for example, who require service provision. The Malta Digital Cluster will represent and introduce Malta’s platform to these donors on service provision in tenders and contracts.