BUS604: Innovation and Sustainability

If cities are where the problems are most acute, they also "offer a natural collaboration setting for solving societal challenges". Urbanization allows for a marshaling of resources and a scaling up of services that is more difficult to accomplish in rural settings. The concentration of people creates a critical mass of diversity that in turn provides opportunities for innovation in new technologies, services, and business models. Cities are the first points of connection for foreign markets and external influences. Cities are also increasingly perceived as hubs of entrepreneurial and innovative activity. The swifter spread of knowledge within dense city environments doesn't only enable computer programmers to enter the global economy, it also enables the diffusion of new ideas about equality and opportunities while giving voice to multiple actors. The challenge is how to further spur innovation in a cost effective and low risk manner, such that even the most resource constrained cities can invest in local prosperity and address core sustainability goals.

Box 1 

Innovation

An innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved product (good or service), or process, a new marketing method, or a new organizational method in business practices, workplace organization, or external relations.

Enhanced connectivity, inexpensive mobile phones, and the use of social media have radically altered citizens' behavior everywhere, and they also have the potential to deeply affect the development of municipal services. Some cities are already applying open innovation models originally developed for the business world, encouraging software developers outside of government to co-create tools and applications in collaboration with citizens and to tap into the knowledge generated in international networks. Indeed, city services can now draw on real time data collected from sensor webs or crowd-sourced from citizens, and customize content for different constituencies by language, location, and channel. This paradigm shift provides an opportunity for even the most resource-constrained municipal authorities to invest in the low-cost development of new services. 

Such transformational solutions may have little to do with the way policy-makers and citizens normally think that problems can and should be solved; yet it is already possible to see the first signs of these changes happening. As this guidebook shows, new models of citizen-driven innovation are in fact emerging to re-define city services and how they are structured and organized, increasing the quality of public service delivery while also contributing to address the global challenges.

Shaped by approaches going under different names –social innovation, user-centered innovation, co-design, design thinking, etc. – these solutions all share a very broad view of innovation, no longer confined to new or improved products and services delivered to markets, but embracing non-technical and social aspects of innovation as well. Indeed, the main goal of a mayor may not be so much to increase the functional efficiency of specific services but more broadly to support and promote broad societal transformations that can promote a good life for citizens regardless of their income level, age or other demographic aspects.

Box 2

Open Innovation

Henry Chesbrough [2003) states that "Open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology".

Box 3

Living Labs for Wicked Problems

The concept of wicked problems was originally proposed by H.J.Rittel and M.M. Webber (1984) in the context of social planning. In solving a wicked problem, the solution of one aspect often reveals another, possibly more complex problem. 

Many times there is no perfect solution for wicked problems, but there are many solutions that may "fit". Here, approaches such as Living Labs seem specifically appropriate, allowing the exploration of situations where innovative solutions are hidden behind a complex web of stakeholders and possible solutions.

'Wicked' problems, such as the pollution of waterways, are often caused by complex links between the behaviors of individuals, organizations, and institutions and increasingly shared by cities regardless of their geographical location. Rather than 'technical fixes' however, we need deep changes in the very structure and organization of our societies, starting from the patterns of our daily behavior and the way we live, work, and play. Such problems are beyond the sphere of influence of a city mayor, in that they derive from phenomena such as the unfettered competition of global markets, the demographic imbalances among countries, and the devastating effects of climate change. Nonetheless, as mentioned above, cities are well-placed to operate as laboratories for the experimentation and development of innovative technologies, services, and business models with the active participation of their citizens.

Just as there are no standard solutions to overcome the wicked problems all cities face today, there is no single best way to engage with citizens and spark off the co-design and innovation processes for a given city administration. There are, however, some common methods that have been defined over time, applying the citizen-driven innovation concept to different situations and generalizing those experiences to facilitate transfer and reciprocal learning. One of the objectives of this guidebook is in fact to extend the impact of these experiences, bringing the Living Lab approaches tested in European settings to address the urgent and severe problems in cities around the world.

Box 4

Definitions

• Smart Cities: A Smart City is a city seeking to address public issues via ICT-based solutions on the basis of a multi-stakeholder, municipally based partnership.
• Social innovations are "innovations that are both social in their ends and their means". 
• User-centered innovation shapes designs to the user's point of view.
• Co-design goes further, by actively engaging all stakeholders on an equal footing in all phases of development.
• Design thinking refers to structured processes that encourage creativity in problem solving.