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
4. Pace Development
As the service concept develops, define together intermediate results that can constitute appropriate moments for dissemination, evaluation, and sharing developments with a broader audience, maximizing the value of the process as you go along. Make sure you recognize and award creativity and clarify ownership issues in due time; here you have to be careful of balancing young developers' rights with the collective interest, making sure the ethical principles of openness and fairness originally agreed upon are met.
Even on the basis of an intermediate result such as a working prototype, it is possible to imagine business and service models. This includes exploring revenue streams and market roles for the different actors both public and private and the governance issues that might arise, perhaps with a need to redefine the rules of the game or identify new players to engage.
Your concept idea can in fact be a good opportunity to attract the attention of a telecoms service provider or a local utility, expanding the partnership and the resource base on which to work. Exploring these issues will in turn help you to identify how to handle issues of ownership and exploitation rights, by thinking about the long-term sustainability of the new service.
In parallel, it is likely that full scale implementation will also require changes in structures and procedures internal to the administration related to data management, process accountability, etc. Here you need to broaden your co-design partnership to include the relevant departments and work together to explore new approaches. Your administration may not be used to it, but the contamination with citizen-driven partnerships can lead to positive long-term effects sparking off innovation processes of their own.