Citizen-Driven Innovation

Getting Started - Chapter 1

If you are attracted by this vision of a humanly smart city built on user-driven innovation, the natural question is: how and where do I start?

Getting started is in fact the hardest part - some of the difficulties have been mentioned above - but once you've gone through the first steps, you're already there. It's like riding a bicycle: you can only learn to ride a bike by trying and maybe falling down a few times. But once you've managed to successfully ride the first few meters, that's it: it becomes a part of you for the rest of your life.

In this chapter, we suggest five steps for getting your first results:

1. Look for the invisible potential in your city
2. Build trust among stakeholders
3. Test collaboration
4. Rethink the role of technology
5. Team up with champions

If you want to benefit from citizen-driven innovation, you have to take the first step. You need to realize you can no longer do it alone, broaden your political space, ask for help from the businesses and citizens in your community, and be ready to commit to co-designing new solutions together. At the beginning, you may feel shaky, but a sincere opening up by the public administration is usually answered with such an abundance of new and exciting ideas from citizens and partner organizations that you wonder why you waited so long.