The J2 Innovations' blog

The home of smart buildings, smart equipment and IoT

Making Smart Transformation Happen: My Role at SBA Italy

Smart Buildings Alliance Italia

The Smart Buildings Alliance (SBA) for Smart Cities is a not-for-profit organization created in France in 2012 that is expanding and gaining influence throughout Europe. Its aim is to bring together various trades and skills in order to promote the development of ‘smart buildings’. With buildings accountable for 40% of the world’s energy use, making buildings smart and energy-efficient is key in the race to tackle the global climate crisis that we are facing.

Having worked in the smart buildings industry for over 20 years, I was thrilled to be part of the SBA’s expansion into my home country of Italy in 2020. Alongside my role at J2 Innovations, I am currently President of the Italian SBA and we are working towards implementing many of the best practices learned from SBA France; aggregating all the stakeholders of home, building, city, and digital infrastructure in a neutral central place. Our priority is to focus on the needs of all our stakeholders and support them to use the latest technology so that homes, buildings, and cities can be improved, become more efficient, comfortable, and of course, smart!

This is a huge challenge – the amount of knowledge required to accomplish our targets is vast, but together with our cofounders, we create working groups to generate simple documents to help others understand complex legal and technical aspects. For example, we have current working groups on home, building, and city digital systems architecture, Digitalization in energy and utilities, European Performance Building Directives, Blockchain, Facility Management, and R2S Ready 2 Services certification of buildings. 

Ready 2 Services (R2S) Certification

R2S is a certification created by SBA to make it possible for every digital service to connect and interact using standard open API using IP Internet Protocol. R2S will be a technical specification to interoperability using independent connected and communicating layers. Thanks to R2S API, any digital device in homes, buildings, or cities will be able to publish or use relevant information to influence the connected environment. This simple language model will use a standard open protocol that is hardware and technology agnostic, resilient, and scalable.

SBA coordination and expansion

As SBA Italy President, I act as a bridge between France and Italy to create coordination and opportunities to collaborate, address cross-border needs, and get a European view of the citizen rights that can be granted in a more efficient way thanks to the digital infrastructure serving modern cities.

In cooperation with Emmanuel Francois, President SBA France, Ernesto Santini, Vice President SBA Italy, and other founders and members of SBA, my role is to leverage contacts in other countries and lay the foundation for SBA’s expansion in other countries.

A better future

I’m passionate about ensuring we have a better future. Through my work at the SBA and J2 Innovations, I am fortunate to be able to bring my industry knowledge and skills to help buildings, cities, and countries be successful in their ‘smart’ transformation.  It’s essential that individuals and companies work together to drive this transformation forward to improve the lives of everyone and ultimately help save the planet.  

Domenico Di Canosa

Domenico joined J2 Innovations in 2018 and is now Southern Europe Director of Sales. He has 22 years of experience working with the most modern controls technologies and in setting up sales and distribution channels in building products. He has a diploma in Industrial Electronics and is BSc graduated from University of London in Business Administration & Marketing

View all articles

Topics from this blog: Company Life Industry

Back to all posts