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?

Building a Strategy - Chapter 2

3. Generate Ideas

With a shared ethos of practice and a vision of what you want and think you can achieve, the next step is to explore your options. Here you are not taking decisions but opening up possibilities: sharing, learning, and discovering. Discovery should be an important step in defining your strategy but also a permanent feature of your innovation policy, so think of the processes you follow and the tools and methods you learn to use as investments for the future.

In the previous chapter, you've begun to see the importance of defining problems to address as a means of exploring new possibilities. Keep working around concrete issues and for each, ask your innovation partners what emerging technologies are coming to market, what research is being done, and what are the current trends. Together, explore the new and different perspectives that can be brought to bear on the problem, and what new stakeholders can be brought to the table to enrich your understanding of it and the possible approaches that can be taken. When you treat issues in the abstract, i.e. 'transportation', you often lose the connection with other factors (for instance, store opening hours). When instead you start with concrete issues on the ground, the transversal dimension emerges – i.e. elementary school schedules > mothers driving to drop off their children > local air quality > health of children – and just as one problem leads to another one solution can lead to another in a systematic fashion. While this approach can make it difficult to identify definitive solutions, it is an excellent way to breed the conditions for generating ideas. Indeed, creativity prospers on this interconnected complexity.

"Focused idea generation is an important part of citizen driven innovation, in that it both addresses concrete issues and introduces new ways of tackling them"

Focused idea generation is thus an important part of citizen-driven innovation, in that it both addresses concrete issues and introduces new ways of addressing them. The Starter Pack at the end of this guidebook identifies specific methods such as Hackathons, Innovation Camps, or Startup Weekends. These are more focused than the open forums of a BarCamp, though they generally respect similar principles: every participant is empowered to express ideas, group decisions identify the best concepts to carry forward, participants develop them in interdisciplinary groups, and so forth. In fact, the structured and sometimes rigid formats of these methods are quite different from the consultation processes that governments normally use to engage with stakeholders. These activities thus have the double function of generating ideas and signaling that new approaches are being experimented, the administration is daring to open up and take risks, and commonly agreed procedures are being respected.

Case Story
Creative Potentials in Bristol

Description

Context

Challenges

Knowle West Media Center (KWMCf works with the community to develop the creative, educational and social potential of people within the surrounding area. KWMC's mission is "To achieve cultural, social and economic regeneration by involving the community in media arts activity, education, and action". It specializes in exploring innovative ways of engaging citizens and communities (often excluded from decision making and research) in the co-design and the testing of ideas, products, and technologies, including quality film, design, and media work.

KWMC was formed in 2002 emerging as a charity with experience of working in a community of 20,000 people affected by unemployment and skills, health, and education issues. KWest Research is Bristol City's Living Lab based at the charity and company limited by guarantee, Knowle West Media Center. Housed in the largest straw bale building in the South West, KWMC works 'locally' engaging citizens but has extensive networks with a wide range of sectors that it draws on for its projects.

Bristol will be European Green Capital in 2015 and KWMC has worked closely with Bristol City Council and Future Cities Directorate, on the smart and green cities agenda for over ten years. The challenge is to work with citizens to co-design and explore Smart Green City innovations, addressing social justice and inequality that is evident in many developed cities in Europe.

 

Actions

Results

Impacts

Scaling Up

KWMC has a wide portfolio of projects that engage citizens in exploring new technology. Media artists are brought in to create data visualization, documentation, and engagement strategies. A comprehensive youth program teaches skills in media, coding and, 'making', together with an ongoing program of digital inclusion workshops. These projects are also carried out in partnership with the Universities of Bristol and Bath and businesses including Toshiba,
IBM and Bristol Media. Currently under development is a Makerlab for Bristol that will teach skills and create new businesses.

Specific examples of projects include:
3Ehouses a smart metering project exploring behavior change
IES Cities is an open data project encouraging citizens to be super-prosumers and designers of future services.
Girls Making History a wearable technology project for young people.
Data Toolkit an open data initiative supporting arts organizations to work with young people on data projects

The KWest Research approach reinforces the recognition that Cities need informed, creative and active citizens to successfully design a sustainable (and fairer) future. This has led to an increasingly close collaboration with Bristol City Council on a wide range of Smart Cities initiatives including a new Open Data platform and projects for Bristol2015.

Sharing knowledge regionally and internationally is an integral part of fostering a better understanding of 'local' communities: to connect communities implies recognizing the importance of differences, similarities, and synergies. Working with large companies and cities across Europe allows to share expertise and bring new insights relating to technology that can only be gathered by working in depth in communities. This practice of working locally and networking internationally is further supported by being part of the European Network of Living Labs.