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

4. Define Scenarios

The vision building and discovery exercises described above provide a solid platform on which to return to a more sector-oriented approach, focusing on specific areas of shared interest and concern such as health care, education, or poverty. For each area, the objective here is to build a long-term, desirable scenario that describes in some detail what your city could and should look like. In doing so, think far enough ahead to get beyond the details of current debates – at least 15 years into the future – but not so far that you lose contact with the reality of the issues to face up to, in the name of a too easy consensus; often it's useful to think in terms of the next generation, about 20 years forward.

Make sure that participation goes beyond the usual set of stakeholders; for instance to discuss food distribution you might want to engage with hotel and restaurant owners, software engineers, school cafeteria managers, environmentalists, and social volunteers as much as farmers, supermarkets, and nutritionists. Each of these stakeholders may have a different approach to the issue, with different problems but also with different ideas and potential contributions to service co-production, and it is useful to learn to see the issues from the standpoints of others.

Box 25

Broadening Partnerships

espaitec, the Science and Technology Park of Castellon (ES), created a Living Lab in 2010 to better engage with stakeholders in the surrounding community, including the Castellon City Council. Today, espaitec is leading the international association of Technology Parks in the move towards Living Lab partnerships for an "Areas of Innovation" scenario.

It is thus best to develop your scenarios as multiple narratives based on different stakeholder experiences unfolding in parallel, both for the present situation and for future scenarios that can be attained using the citizen-driven approach. From there, you can identify the different kinds of transactions between actors and the reciprocal benefits gained from different value chains: some methods such as the Rainforest Canvas help you to map the key components of these city ecosystems within which individual activities, businesses, and public services unfold. You can then explore the impacts and sustainability issues according to the specific service or business models for the different actors taken individually. Your scenario thus not only describes the possible workings of desirable city systems but the basic elements of sustainability. Finally, you should go back to your vision statement and see how this more detailed work feeds back into it.

Case Story
Co-designing Scenarios in Colombia

Description	Context	Challenges
The World Bank, using funds of the Korean Trust Fund, implemented a project in the three Colombian cities of Barranquilla, Cali, and Manizales, which aimed at building workable scenarios for the development of tailored technology solutions to solve urban challenges, as well as the creation of an enabling environment for Smart Cities. In particular, the objectives of the project were: (i) to modernize the e-government back-office to support a Smart City model, (ii) to develop smart applications in Colombian cities using ICT tools to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of municipal public service delivery, (iii)to create a smart applications exchange and initiate a Smart Cities network of practitioners, and (iv) to build consensus at the national level to define action lines for a national Smart Cities Strategy in Colombia.	Colombia is Latin America's third largest economy and one of its champions of e-government and connectivity, with internet connection stripling to 6.2 million over the last two and a half years. The government's Plan Vive Digital sets ambitious objectives for ICT infrastructure, services, applications and contents, and adoption and use. This project is thus part of an effort to ground these investments in the effective uptake of innovation in local administrations.	The main challenges for the promotion of an open innovation environment for Smart Cities are linked to the need to overcome cultural barriers within each of the Municipalities. Public servants are in fact used to thinking of innovation as something that happens either externally (in a private company and then sold to the public sector) or top-down (pushed by policymakers). The identification and promotion of Change Makers within the administration was achieved by engagement in co-design and scenario-building activities.

Actions	Results	Impacts	Scaling Up
A series of co-design activities were carried out, all with the purpose of engaging public servants, exploring new ways to address problems, and opening minds to innovation. The main initiatives carried out included: Smart government road map: analyzing existing IT infrastructures to define path towards Smart City scenarios. Co-design technology solutions: mixing civil society organizations, local universities, software developer communities, public officials, and sector specialists to co-design solutions to urban challenges. Crowdsourcing solutions to urban challenges: a Hackathon carried out simultaneously in the three cities to build local innovation communities. Urban Innovation Lab: providing a sustainable institutional structure for citizen-driven innovation. Access to International Networks: through initiatives such as the World Bank's Citi- Sense event in Barcelona.	Among the more emblematic outcomes is Co-crea Colombia, the networked hackathon. More than 200 entrepreneurs and university students participated and proposed 45 ICT solutions to overcome their city's development challenges. The nine finalist teams went through a 2-month mentoring, and the winning team traveled to London to visit the UK's innovation ecosystem and strengthen its entrepreneurial skills. For designing the Urban Innovation Lab, experts from the European Network of Living Labs were brought in to discuss best practices with Colombian city and national government officials in a customized training course "City as a Laboratory. Training Program on Open Innovation in Cities'. The city managers thus were able to exchange first-hand the results and benefits of the program with others.	The greatest impacts involved a change of mindsets by (i) raising awareness among mayors and city leaders on how ICTs can shape scenarios for delivering better services to citizens; (ii) building capacity among city officials in leveraging existing ICTs to improve the quality of life in their city; and (iii) showing the benefits of engaging with the local ecosystem (i.e. academia, private sector, civil society).	Thanks to this project, upstream activities have been triggered and ongoing discussions with the Colombian ICT Ministry are taking place to scale up this support to cities nationwide. In addition, at the end of 2013, the ICT Ministry launched a National Smart Cities Strategy for Colombia46 aimed at improving citizens' quality of life by harnessing ICTs.