Taipei Smart City PMO — A Living-Lab Matchmaker for Urban Tech Pilots

Taipei's Department of Information Technology established the Smart City Project Management Office (TPMO) in 2016, operated by the Taipei Computer Association, to match private companies pitching urban-tech ideas directly with relevant city bureaus rather than through traditional public tenders.

Running on an annual budget of about NT$30 million with around 20 staff, the TPMO coordinates more than 30 civil departments and agencies under the city's '1+7' framework, pitching-and-matching companies to bureaus for real-world pilots such as the WeMo e-scooter service and a UAV-based disaster-response communication link with the Fire Department.

In its first year the TPMO ran nearly 600 matchmaking meetings, interviewed about 200 companies and completed over 60 matchmaking cases; over its first three years to 2019 it fielded more than 100 pilot proposals, of which roughly a third advanced to proof-of-concept, and cumulatively more than 200 smart-city projects have produced tangible results, split between about 30 top-down initiatives and 170 bottom-up proposals, 32% of the latter originating from start-ups.

The model has been recognised internationally, winning WeGO's 'Cooperative City' award and being catalogued by the EBRD's Green Cities programme as a transferable policy tool, though the office itself acknowledges that the conversion rate from pitch to lasting project remains modest, that existing procurement regulation constrains deeper collaboration, and that its goal of becoming partly self-financing has not yet been realised.