BUS604: Innovation and Sustainability

Just as the Living Lab movement took off when the ICT industry realized that people were inventing ways to use mobile phones better than their design teams, city Mayors have begun to realize that the best solution is to capture this citizen creativity and work together. Urban Living Labs were thus born as public spaces within which city governments can engage citizens and steer co-design processes in the most useful way towards the development of innovative city services. In this process, hitherto unknown and unexplored resources emerge on all sides: citizens (and equally public servants spread throughout the administration) become valuable sources of first-hand knowledge about a city's problems while city rules and procedures become potential spaces for experimentation. Through collaborative processes, service co-design results from a dialogue between citizen needs and administrative constraints, leading to solutions that are generally far more effective and cost-efficient, well received by the public because they've been designed by the public. Many such services also involve citizens in the actual service delivery process, such as monitoring air quality, further reinforcing a new alliance with city governments that goes far beyond the sense of political belonging driven by the electoral cycle.

Box 9

'Human' Energy Saving

In one experiment, school children in Helsinki started a competition between classes to see who could produce the greatest energy savings. Using smart meters, they discovered that the highest consumption came from the school kitchen, so they re-negotiated the weekly menu with the cooks.

In another initiative in the Swedish city of Malmoe, a University design team helped apartment tenants build their own smart meters using the open source Arduino platform. This led to a strong sense of ownership, resulting in users actually monitoring their consumption and acting accordingly.

By fully bringing the human dimension into the Smart City model, blending social and technological innovation, a new approach thus emerges for addressing city problems. Even more, a new vision emerges for what a city is and how its institutions work. In the traditional mindset, the main role of city governments is to manage and administer public services. In this view, the redesign and re-engineering of existing services only happens as an exception: Smart City infrastructures are something to buy and install, citizen engagement is an episodic consultation process to be called upon only when necessary, and Urban Living Labs (if they are set up at all) carry out occasional experiments of service innovation that remain marginal to the city government's main mission. Now the paradigm shift lies in the recognition that research and co-design are no longer isolated moments, but they have become the norm. The seemingly unstoppable trends towards global warming and demographic change, among others, together with the accelerating pace of change of the technologies designed to address these issues, means that the space between solving one problem and the appearance of the next has disappeared.

Box 10

Environmental Monitoring in Nice

The ICT Usage Lab worked with citizens and the local authority in Nice to make use of portable devices equipped with the appropriate sensors and GPS localization, putting environmental monitoring in the hands of 'citizen sensors'. As pedestrians and cyclists go about their daily activities, hundreds of signals are captured in real time, providing coverage of the urban environment that is far more dynamic and complete. Citizens, happy to take care of their own device, also co-designed apps and services that use the collected data.

Over the past few years, many city governments have made significant efforts to increase the role of functions such as innovation, environment, and social services, often setting up dedicated departments and special facilities. Yet the issues to address tend to extend beyond the confines of a single department, which contrasts with the traditional, silo-based organization of public administrations. Thus, those responsible for ICT or innovation policy end up challenging the historical primacy of other city departments such as Infrastructure or Economic Development, particularly as budgets are squeezed and competition for resources increases, and administration gridlock sets in. In the meantime, frugal, citizen driven solutions provide concrete, real-world evidence of their effectiveness, in a different but equally powerful way to the traditional approaches the departments are fighting over. As a more humanly Smart City vision spreads from community to community, it becomes ever more evident that the impasse in city administrations needs to be urgently overcome.

Box 11

Beyond Departmental Boundaries

To continue with the example of environmental monitoring in Nice, this new service was conceived of as an experiment in an EU-funded research project, but simply and immediately produced tangible results. The barriers of traditional administrative silos have difficulty resisting such evidence: how long can the Environment and Procurement departments ignore these outcomes? 

Cities that see the change coming can thus make the choice of openly embracing citizen-driven innovation rather than allowing the nature and structure of government to prevent it from happening. Indeed, the biggest commitment is not technical (though it does involve technology), nor financial (though it's not free), but rather the cultural and political change required to simply let it grow. This in turn has two important effects:

• The essential role and purpose of government shifts from managing and administering to the orchestration of open innovation processes, requiring the collaboration of a broad range of stakeholders, especially those not normally engaged in political negotiation processes.
• In order to create the conditions for the fruitful engagement of stakeholders, the nature of political trust changes, from a commitment to fulfilling promises (delivering policy objects) to a commitment to openness, transparency, inclusiveness, and shared ownership (delivering policy processes).

Once you make the shift to trusting and engaging citizens and tapping into their boundless reservoir of ideas and creativity, many policies can be seen in a new light. Elevating digital skills among citizens is a valid way to defend your community against globalization, but if citizens are actively collaborating with the city administration it also increases their ability to contribute: the same goes for empowering public servants. When digital literacy becomes an important asset in your city and a goal shared by both the public administration and its citizens, addressing key issues such as security and privacy becomes a common concern rather than a battleground for lawyers. As a strategic goal, the human Smart City vision is thus a political objective as well as a technical one; the opportunities and choices, the risks and dangers can and should be addressed at the political level as well. For mayors, the challenge is not so much to install the latest infrastructures or adopt the newest technologies, but to take the lead in guiding a new process where the public sphere regains its preeminent role in civic life, guaranteeing an open and transparent playing field in which citizen-driven innovation processes can unfold.

Box 12

E-services in Rural Communities

The Siyakhula Living Lab in Eastern Cape, South Africa, brings together academia, industry, government, and the Dwesa community to address communication needs of remote rural communities through research, development, and training. An integrated e-services platform for marginalized areas – TeleWeaver – is currently under development, to increase the usefulness of the infrastructure (deployed in schools but open to the community at large) and to make it sustainable through the creation of revenue streams associated with each e-service.

Indeed, valuable and sustainable ICT applications are more likely to develop within an environment that encourages experimentation and collaboration between technologists, entrepreneurs, and development practitioners everywhere. Often, stakeholders may combine their interests in joint projects. For example, in the African continent the recent flowering of local ICT development clusters – such as the iHub and NaiLab in Kenya, the Hive CoLab and AppLab in Uganda, Activspaces in Cameroon, BantaLabs in Senegal, Kinu in Tanzania, and infoDev's mLabs in Kenya and South Africa – is helping to create new spaces for collaboration, training, application, and content development, and for the preincubation of firms.

There is a big benefit to this open approach: anyone can do it, whatever the baseline of infrastructures and capabilities and whatever the amount of money at hand. People and not things are at the heart of citizen-driven innovation, and there are plenty of examples of important new services developed with the simplest of devices. Recent figures show an exponential growth of internet penetration and smartphone adoption; yet many life-saving services have also been devised using simple SMS. Creativity is such because it makes the best of what is available, so every city and every person will have their own mix of problems and opportunities and thus find their own path to innovation.

This means that the benefits of citizen-driven innovation are equally open to different forms and sizes of cities, cities within cities, or rural areas surrounding cities. Humanly smart services, when they rely more on people and creativity than they do on expensive infrastructures, are available to small towns, urban favelas, and rural villages the same way they are to the most advanced urban areas. This allows to apply the principles of citizen-driven innovation for instance to dispersed networks of small to medium sized towns. Equally, those in big cities can extend their strategies to include broad metropolitan areas, involving peripheral towns with the shared goal of re-balancing territorial development by bringing the same opportunities to all.

Box 13

Social Mentoring in Rural Areas

European rural policy has successfully focused on building partnerships that link neighboring municipalities with a common development strategy. This has proven fertile ground for the introduction of collaboration technologies to build on their social capital and co-design new services. Such is the case of the Living Lab Consortium Fernando de los Ríos, which promotes innovation and business start-ups for health and well-being in rural Spanish communities. 

For city mayors and administrators with increasingly heavy responsibilities, there is another important advantage: sharing the burden. As cities grow and become ever more attractive, expectations on the ability of public administrations to deliver services also grow. At the heart of the so-called 'democratic deficit' is the fact that most city administrations have gone beyond the tipping point and are simply unable to deliver. On the other hand, those who are capable of re-capturing the trust of their citizens discover that they don't have to do it all alone. By engaging citizens and stakeholders in co-designing and co-producing city services, everyone participates in sharing the burden, on the condition that the public sector in turn demonstrates the willingness and capability of collaborating on an equal footing. It takes some learning however, as the people in a city administration are not used to opening up their processes and sharing responsibilities, nor are citizens used to contributing actively to what is normally considered the job of their city administration. Helping all concerned learn to engage and to manage these processes is in fact one of the key objectives of this guidebook.

Box 14

Regeneration in Fundao

As a small municipality in the central hills of Portugal, Fundao had difficulties keeping its young and talented and attracting investments, until it launched a Social Innovation strategy in 2011. A co-working space, Fablab, and Social Business Incubator were set up, together with 'Casas Oficina' in the old center. Fundao has thus positioned itself as a shared service center, attracting national and international investments for 300 highly qualified jobs and hosting 40 start-ups and 10 innovative NGOs.

The vision of a human and equitable Smart City is thus both a common vision across the globe and a special vision for your city, its resources, and its people. It is not a vision to be defined at the start and then overshadowed by the details of implementation, but must be kept at the center of every activity through a constant process of verification and validation with all concerned. Indeed, when a city's vision is based on engagement and reciprocal trust, it expresses shared, collective goals of prosperity, well-being, and sustainability.