Citizen-Driven Innovation

Read this guidebook, which explores smart cities through a lens that promotes citizens as the driving force of urban innovation. It presents different models of smart cities that show how citizen-centric methods can mobilize resources to respond innovatively to challenges in governance. The living lab approach encourages agile development and the rapid prototyping of ideas in a decentralized and user-centric manner. How can mayors and public administrators create partnerships that drive value in their communities through citizen-driven innovation? How can sustainability be integrated into municipal strategies and solutions? How can city leaders join forces to learn and network globally?

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.