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
2. Build Trust
The next important step is in fact to build (or re-build) trust between your city administration and all of your potential partners in a citizen-driven innovation strategy. It helps to first make a quick census of which groups and contacts might be the most interesting to work with. You will certainly need to connect with at least some digital innovators, and to do this you will probably need support in scanning the web to look for groups and initiatives that are already active in your city. You should also look for some of the less vocal citizen groups, for instance by exploring a specific issue in a specific neighborhood, getting behind the newspaper headlines to see who is really doing what, since truly active citizen and innovation communities tend to coalesce around concrete problems to be solved.
Case Story
City Laboratory in Mexico City
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Description |
Context |
Challenges |
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The Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Laboratory for the City) is Mexico City's new experimental office for civic innovation and urban creativity, the first city government department of its kind in Latin America. The Lab is a space for rethinking, re-imagining, and reinventing the way citizens and government can work together towards a more open, more livable, and more imaginative city. |
Since its foundation in 2013, the Lab is constantly seeking new proposals and provocations around the problems and opportunities of the city through collaborative efforts, both within government and through civil society. Mexico City is thus the creative testing ground, the space that inspires and provokes, that shapes views and roles, bursting with potential. |
Although a small office compared to most government departments, and tiny compared to the sheer size and complexity of Mexico City, the Laboratorio keeps ambitions high by relying on small-scale interventions, prototypes, soft infrastructure, and social capital. The Lab's civic innovation experiments seek to improve government services and make government more open, more responsive, and more receptive to citizen participation and feedback. For this, a focused, intimate perspective can be a good way to address and shed light on complex and serious issues such as social innovation, sustainability, economic development, infrastructure, participation, public space, common good, etc. When experiments prove successful at the micro-scale, they can be adopted by the city at a larger scale either at the policy level or as citizen driven initiatives. At the same time, joint action and narratives are able to push strategic conversations across the silos of different ministries. |
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Actions |
Results |
Impacts |
Scaling Up |
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In all the Laboratorio's activities, government is seen as an attractor of talent, a space of opportunity, and a motor for innovation and civic entrepreneurship. Urban Artifact, an urban observation tool. |
In a year and a half of activity, more than 40 events have been held, ranging from conferences to workshops, creating spaces for dialogue. In HackCDMX 500 participants produced 52 web and smartphone apps using public datasets in less than 45 hours. With CödigoCDMX. six civic hackers worked during nine months, each with a specific city ministry, to develop an app that would offer a solution to citizens' everyday problems. One API created by our fellows was accessed more than 4 million times in less than 5 months. |
Overall, the Laboratorio's Open Government strategy is swiftly gaining ground. Laboratorio para la Ciudad has created the foundations for citizen-driven innovation projects to become part of city life, and offer new tools in urban spaces. These foundations will eventually allow projects to grow on their own and invite other people to profit from available data to rethink the city. |
With 'open government' as one of its main goals, all the Laboratorio's work and data are open to anyone; participation in the constellation of labs around the world allows to constantly share experiences and learn, in a tight relationship with other cities such as Buenos Aires. |
Before reaching out to these new stakeholders, try to see the situation from their perspective: Do they want to interact with the city government? Are they being offered the support they really need? How can they be convinced that their commitment is not just being used for political visibility? Keep in mind that a) you need them as much as if not more than they need you and b) they may not be interested in what you think you have to offer them (power, money, or fame). What they are definitely looking for is a different type of practice and behavior from a public administration, one that is open to being engaged with – open to listen and open to change – and not necessarily one that has all the answers. What kind of signals can you send out to communicate that this is indeed the case?
A good starting point is to think in terms of reciprocity: you'll need to trust them as much as they trust you. Do you want to organize an event to get to know new actors? Show your respect for them by using a participatory form of engagement: BarCamp, Open Space, and similar methods as discussed in the Starter Pack; you may be surprised at how effective they can be. Show you are really listening by asking to be listened to in turn; be open and honest about the kinds of problems the public administration is facing (not just "we don't have the money") in relation to the issues raised by your new stakeholders. Identify what can be done to better meet their needs by thinking creatively yourself.
Box 18
Roles in Collaborative Groups
Actors play different roles but in most communities of practice you will find examples of the following: Leaders provide guidance and management, aligning with the strategic goals; Sponsors nurture relationships between actors and the community; Facilitators help the leaders to energize the community, Coordinators maintain, plan and tidy up the practical work within the community; and subject-matter Experts share their deep knowledge of the theme or topic.
Box 19
Co-creating an Innovation Hub in Gran Concepción
In order to imagine, discover, and define a city-wide innovation hub in Concepción, Chile, the World Bank ICT Group and the Government of Chile invited 30 individuals to a three-day workshop based on co-creation techniques. In this process, the team articulated a shared vision of the future hub - from its linkages with community stakeholders to potential business plans - and identified concrete actions for making it a reality. The workshop was driven by the participants, guided by world-class facilitators and speakers sharing their experiences of operating hubs as orchestrators of effective user-driven, collaborative innovation ecosystems in their respective cities.
Think also about roles and responsibilities as well as the expected contributions from different actors in your innovation partnerships. These mini-communities have their own social structures that require cultivation in order to change and grow - and sometimes even to finish the job on time. It is important to agree on a clear definition of roles, as confusion about who does what is a common source of tension and conflict, often leading to misunderstandings and unsuccessful outcomes. These problems can derive from a lack of communication – people who think they're saying the same thing when they aren't – a lack of clarity in expectations on what is to be done, or a redundancy of competencies in an over-crowded team.