What Brno Proved, and Why EABID Members Should Pay Attention

Over three days in early June, Brno hosted URBIS, Central Europe's largest smart city meetup. There were 6,000 visitors, 176 exhibitors, and speakers from Finland, the UK, Portugal and beyond. Behind the scale of the event was something more directly useful for EABID members: a tested method for agile piloting led by cities.

An almost three-year experiment, done in public

URBIS 2026 marked the close of PilotInnCities, an almost three-year Interreg Danube programme coordinated by the Czech Ministry of Industry and Trade. The premise was simple: stop talking about innovation in cities and actually pilot it. Fast, small-scale, in real environments, with real users.

It resulted in 26 pilots across six countries — the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Germany, Hungary, Romania and Serbia — built on a Finnish-inspired agile method adapted for Central and Eastern European conditions.

The method was tested across municipalities and regions in all six countries, including Plzeň. And the outputs are now publicly available.

Plzeň: mid-sized, agile, and already doing it

PINE, the Plzeň Innovation Ecosystem and an EABID member, was one of the test sites.

This pilot focused on smart water management – recognising that the average water system loses around 20% of its water. A local startup, nextdrop, installed real-time leak detection across six sites: three primary schools, Plzeň's FC Viktoria stadium, TechTower technology park, and the city zoo.

The results were concrete: a 17% reduction in overall water consumption, nearly 100 hidden leaks detected, and one unnoticed leak at the football stadium running at nearly €20,000 every month.

Plzeň's experience shows what mid-sized cities can actually do. Large enough to test across different types of municipal assets, but small enough for the city, the startup and the institutions to align and move quickly.

The work is documented, replicable and financeable. Schools can still apply for installation grants through October 2026.

Mid-sized innovation ecosystems can move fast when the right people already know each other.

The Czech ecosystem: connected nationally, looking internationally

What made URBIS interesting beyond any single project was the visible coherence of the Czech approach. PilotInnCities was nested within the national RIS3 innovation policy framework, backed by five ministries, connected to ENoLL, and linked to a growing community of Czech living labs forming under the #CZELLAP umbrella.

The government framed agile piloting as a practical tool for helping the public sector move from discussing innovation to testing it in real conditions.

The Czech approach is deliberately outward-facing. ENoLL's Koen Vervoort and Marta I. De Los Ríos White were in Brno for one-to-one consultations. Finnish and Dutch innovation leads ran workshops. A Slovenian business mission was in the room, alongside African ministerial delegations comparing notes on infrastructure challenges in a city of sixteen million.

What EABID members can borrow

Three things worth taking from URBIS 2026:

• ●The agile piloting method is pragmatic and works. Test it against your own context, adapt it. The Czech and Slovak teams spent almost three years testing what works in environments structurally similar to many EABID member cities. You do not need to start from scratch, and can carve that timeline down significantly.
• ●The living lab model scales from city to region. BVV Brno operates a living lab on its trade fair campus. Plzeň ran pilots across municipal assets. The Czech community is formalising this into a national network. If your district is exploring living lab designation or ENoLL membership, there is now a Central European peer community to connect with. When public institutions scale at regional levels it creates a market, and that's good for business!
• ●The quadruple helix can be orchestrated, but someone has to do it. What worked in Plzeň required a coordinating body — SITMP, the city's IT company — an institutional champion, a technology partner, and testing environments. That combination does not self-assemble. EABID members who want to run similar pilots need to be clear about which of those roles is missing in their own ecosystem.

Tomáš Šebesta is a consultant at Business Innovation Centre Plzeň and Ambassador of PINE, the Plzeň Innovation Ecosystem, and communications lead for EABID.