“Any smart city or smart community must have goals. We look at economic development, at optimizing the use of the city or the respective community, we look at sustainability, but also at ensuring the quality of life. Cities need to become more attractive because we spend most of our lives there, in a very competitive context,” Mihai Boldijar, General Manager, Bosch Romania said during the Smart Transformation Forum organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“Technology connects all the ecosystems in a city or community and makes them work interconnected for greater efficiency and to optimize performance within that city. All ‘smart’ projects must have one goal: to serve the citizen. If the citizen is not in the center of attention of the local authorities, something is wrong. The citizen must always have priority,” he explained.

“We must have a strategy and a vision, without which things cannot be put into practice. We have ongoing projects on all continents. There are projects on smart parking, smart mobility, smart traffic.

We have a project that started recently on the intelligent management of waste collection. The best projects are those that are developed in partnership with all actors involved in a community, with appropriate funding schemes.

It is a very attractive field, a lot of jobs can be created and I think that will make the difference between those who have vision and those who do not.”