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?
Co-designing Solutions - Chapter 3
3. Follow Up on Creativity
Whether you have chosen to organize a one-weekend event or hold a three-month crowdsourcing challenge (or both), the process you have initiated does not stop there: follow-up is key to ensuring that the full benefits are actually reaped. Indeed, the purpose of these co-design formats is to give focus and visibility to the process, but what happens afterward is as important as the preparation of what happens before. A valid service idea or functional sketch of an app gives participants the awareness that solutions can indeed be found, but there is still a long path to transform a good idea into an effective city service. Above all, by committing your city and its administration to innovate and support citizen-driven codesign processes, you have accumulated a significant capital of trust. If you cannot keep your promises following the most co-creative phase of the process, the broken expectations will be extremely difficult to recover.
Box 27
The Espoo Story
The City of Espoo (FI) uses a broad participatory process to define the Espoo Story – history, present, and future i.e. the strategy in a nutshell – formally adopted by the City Council. The challenges identified are addressed in all city activities across services and implemented in development projects in collaboration within the city but also with citizens, companies, and other partner organizations.
The key to effective follow-up is to guarantee real political and organizational commitment to the co-design process you have initiated. Give visibility and support to the process, the results, and the champions of the process on the city website, through press conferences and other institutional communication. Be ready to reply flexibly to possible needs for relatively small amounts of short-term funding required for instance to build a prototype to test. Provide public spaces or meeting and working facilities for the co-design groups to follow up on their work. Alert the relevant city departments of the possible need to open up data or define procedures for new service concepts and organize the required interaction.
Case Story
Innovating City Hall in Amsterdam
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Description |
Context |
Challenges |
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The City of Amsterdam launched a new Chief Technology Office in 2014, as a transversal, internal city department that fosters and accelerates innovation both within and outside of city hall. To achieve this end, the CTO office maintains a rich network outside of the city administration with innovation agencies and start up accelerators, as well as universities and industry leaders. |
The City of Amsterdam, with its population of over 800,000 inhabitants, strives to be one of the leading innovation hubs in Europe. The establishment of the CTO office is thus in line with a long-standing policy of design-based innovation for sustainable lifestyles. The CTO Office is governed by the city's Chief Technology Officer, Ger Baron, and is empowered to operate across city sectors and divisions, reporting directly to the General Secretary. The CTO Office collaborates with the CSO (Chief Scientific Officer) and CIO (Chief Innovation Officer) to provide a coherent framework for city wide innovation schemes, jointly advising the different clusters dealing with e g. social and economic matters within the city administration. |
The main trigger for establishing the CTO office is the need for transformation within the city hall. This is in part related to budget cuts but more importantly it aims to revalidate and rejuvenate urban services as well as launch new services that reflect both the needs of citizens and those of the city hall. This challenge is addressed through an approach called 'interfacing', through which the city opens up to citizens, asking them to contribute to the design of a 'future-proof city. This happens through crowdsourcing campaigns51 and offline meetings52 but also by interactive policy workshops such as the THNK Bike Lab. |
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Actions |
Results |
Impacts |
Scaling Up |
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Open Innovation, social innovation, interactive policy making, and ICT driven innovation are the CTO office's main actions. The starting workplan aims to address the following key themes: |
The main expected result, beyond the contribution to the city's overall innovation policy, is an increase in 'innovation literacy' among civil servants. This will allow the city hall to adopt a more agile approach to implementing innovation, using service design and rapid prototyping methods, and enable the administration to better address complex urban problems. |
The CTO Office has the necessary operational freedom to support innovation actions within the city hall. This does not mean that it operates in isolation; to the contrary, it plays the role of active initiator of a City Innovator's Network, where Open Data and innovation minded colleagues can meet up and share knowledge. |
The CTO office had just been launched in 2014 with a starting staff of 5 employees, planned to expand to 17 (on a project basis) by end 2015. In addition, it has a hot desking office to share knowledge and open up to both city servants as well as the outside world. External and internal staff can thus join the CTO office's project workgroups as needed. |