The Government of Catalonia has approved its first Plan to establish controlled test spaces, known as sandboxes. The aim is to help companies, organisations and entrepreneurs validate innovative solutions in real environments and with legal certainty, as published by ESMARTCITY. In this way, technologies, business models and services can be tested before being launched on a large scale.

Sandboxes work as temporary and specialized environments that allow you to check whether innovative solutions, those that have already passed the laboratory phase and are ready to work in a real environment, are viable. In short, it is a question of seeing what works and what needs to be adjusted before deploying it definitively.

The projects will be developed under the supervision of the public administration, which will make it possible to control risks without slowing down innovation.

At the same time, this model will also serve to generate useful knowledge from a regulatory point of view, a key aspect for adapting regulations to new technological and business realities.

The initiative is part of the Catalonia Leads Plan and is aligned with experiences already implemented in other European countries.

The deployment of the sandboxes will be done through agreements between institutions, such as the Generalitat, public entities, and local bodies. Each space will have a limited duration, which in no case will exceed five years.

Companies will be able to access them through public calls, presenting projects that will be evaluated both for their level of technological maturity and for their potential impact.

Before activating each sandbox, an idea collection phase can be opened to identify regulatory barriers and better adapt the projects to the reality of the market.

Each space will have a monitoring committee made up of representatives of the institutions involved, which will be responsible for supervising the tests and analysing the results.

All this will allow us to obtain very useful information to adjust the regulations and provide a better response to the new needs of the sector.