Smart Business Festival took place on January 27, 2021 this year. It summarized the news in the strategic area of ​​Industry 4.0 and the implementation of digital innovations and also offered foreign inspiration in these areas. Due to the epidemiological situation and measures against the spread of COVID-19, the festival took place virtually as an online broadcast from improvised studio in the conference room provided by the Technology Center of the ASCR. TC AS CR has been cooperating with the main organizer, the CzechInno association, for a long time and has been a professional partner of the Smart Business Festival since its first year.

At the beginning of the event, the Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade for the Management of the Digitization and Innovation Section Petr Očko, the Government Plenipotentiary for Digitization and IT and the Director of the National Agency for Communication and Information Technologies Vladimír Dzurilla and the Director of the Industrial Digitization Management Section of the European Commission Yves Paindaveine presented news from their institutions. In the morning block experts summarized the resources and processes needed for the successful digital transformation and recovery of the economy and society after the covid pandemic and pointed out the widening scissors between naturally digital or already digitized and other traditional companies. The conclusion of the conference program belonged to the lecture of prof. Peter Staňek, who presented his visions of the digital economy and society in the post-covid era.

In the afternoon, Smart Business Festival participants were connected to the First Annual EU EDIH Conference in Luxembourg. There were presented six newly nominated Czech candidates for European Centers for Digital Innovation (EDIH) in a joint virtual discussion room, whose activities should significantly contribute to successful digital transformation of small and medium-sized enterprises and the public sphere in the coming years:

• BRAIN FOR INDUSTRY based in Prague with a primary focus on artificial intelligence, whose managing partner and coordinator is: Institute of Physics CAS,
• CYBERSECURITY INNOVATION HUB based in Brno with the main focus on cyber security, whose leader and coordinator is CyberSecurity Hub, z.ú. as a joint institute of three universities - Masaryk University, the Czech Technical University in Prague and the Brno University of Technology,
• DIH NORTHERN AND EASTERN BOHEMIA with its registered office in Liberec and its primary focus on the field of artificial intelligence, whose leading partner and coordinator is the Agency for Regional Development s.r.o.,
• EDIH CVUT based in Prague with the main focus on the field of artificial intelligence, whose managing partner is the Czech Technical University in Prague,
• EDIH DIGIMAT based in Kurim and the main focus on artificial intelligence, whose leader and coordinator is Intemac Solutions, s.r.o.,
• EDIH OSTRAVA based in Ostrava, whose main focus is supercomputing (HPC) and managing partner and coordinator of the Technical University of Ostrava.