Citizen-Driven Innovation

Building a Strategy - Chapter 2

If you have applied our suggestions from the previous chapter, you will have seen that citizendriven innovation is easier than it looks and probably more powerful than you thought.

To follow our previous metaphor, you will have learned to ride a bicycle. Among your citizens, you will probably have raised expectations and generated enthusiasm, but this initial magic is a fragile thing; transforming such energy into the daily practice of how your city works requires careful leadership. Above all, every step needs to maintain the principles of openness and collaboration, since you will need the support of all involved to judge together when and how to move forward.

In this chapter, we suggest the key steps to define a citizen-driven innovation strategy:

1. Set the rules
2. Define a vision
3. Generate ideas
4. Define scenarios
5. Make a plan

By going beyond the first initiatives to build a solid, permanent partnership for citizen driven innovation, you will need to work on several dimensions in parallel, which we will explore in this and the following chapters. This includes:

• A coherent strategy and vision for your city
• Co-designed solutions to real problems
• A solid framework for long-term sustainability
• Networking and knowledge exchange with other cities and communities.

The first step however is to give coherence to the episodic moments of creative collaboration you have guided so far. In your initial 'light and quick' test projects you selected problems mostly for their ability to engage stakeholders and initiate the practice of co-design; eventually you need to move towards a strategy that addresses the real problems of your city in a systematic way. This requires that you co-design a broad framework for your citizen-driven strategy together with your core innovation partnership, so that individual projects fit into a broader picture and work together towards the common vision.