DigitalHQ clg -The Centre for Digital First Communities
Empowering localities and their traditional small businesses to get the most from digital growth
Want to attract investment, remote workers, home buyers, shoppers and visitors to your locality?
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The challenges facing Ireland’s towns and villages are well documented. Many Irish towns have a built environment that reflects the needs of their communities in the late 19th century.
Since 2016 with the support of Bank of Ireland and DLR CoCo we have evolved a model which we call 'Digital First Communities' which ew would like to share with other communities that wish to take ownership of their economic destiny.
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A 'Digital First Community' has three components, managing the digital footprint of the locality (in particular maximising its Digital Visibility Index), attracting and retaining knowledge workers to sustain the business mix in the town (B2C, B2B and social enterprises) and finally the use of digital signage to communicate and connect.
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Reimagining hubs as the power behind Digital First Communities
At the heart of a Digital First Community is the Digital Growth Hub. The hub seeks to future proof the small business community of its locality by creating a fusion between new and old ways of doing business. While traditional enterprise centres and commercial coworking spaces focus inwardly on their client companies and community within their facility, a digital growth hub focuses both inwardly on the incubated member businesses but also outwardly on digitally empowering the locality it sits within.
This outward focus is what distinguishes a digital growth hub from a remote working hub or an enterprise centre.
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Embedding digital capability and agility in small businesses
The Digital Growth Mindset is the constant focus on the best way to grow your businesses using the optimal mix between your core team, technology and outsourcing.
This requires a significant mindset change which is not so much ‘training’ owners how to use the functions of certain tools but creating a mindset of how you can best achieve the outcome you need for your business.
The key to this is removing non-value add work through digitalisation to enable you to focus on the core offering of your business, that which is valued by your customers as a clincher in choosing you over all your competitors.
How can localities benefit from digital growth?
Eoin Costello, Championing 'Digital First Communities' at DigitalHQ clg
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