2020 Intelligent Community of the Year Announcement: Tallinn, Estonia

Tallinn, Estonia is Named as 2020 Intelligent Community of the Year

For the first time in the twenty-one-year history of the award, the Intelligent Community Forum honored an Estonian city with its top award today when it named Tallinn, Estonia as its 2020 Intelligent Community of the Year. Tallinn has been engaged in the Intelligent Community Awards program for over a decade, having been previously named to the list of the ICF’s Top7 Communities six times since 2007. Tallinn succeeds Taoyuan, Taiwan as the think-tank’s Intelligent Community of the Year. During the Summit, Taoyuan’s Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan addressed attendees reflecting on Taoyuan’s time as the reigning Intelligent Community and congratulated the Top7 of 2020 for their achievements.

Estonia saw a major boom from 2004 to 2007, as loan capital poured in from Scandinavian countries. The country’s rise from Soviet occupation, beginning in 1991, had been miraculous, but the wave of investment was more than the market could usefully absorb. When the financial crisis came, it hit Estonia and its principal city of Tallinn very hard. Several thousand companies went bankrupt and layoffs, particularly of the low-skilled, rose into the tens of thousands. Yet beneath the froth, Tallinn has put into place the foundations of ICT-based growth that is generating a strong comeback. Tallinn’s first wave of IT industry growth was driven by national government spending on an amazing range of e-government applications. Its return to growth has a more sustainable basis in education and entrepreneurship. With 23 universities and technical schools, Tallinn has the resources for a knowledge workforce; it has focused now on expanding access and filling demand for ICT and digital content skills.

For the complete Press Release see: https://www.intelligentcommunity.org/tallinn_estonia_named_2020_intelligent_community_of_the_year