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?
Ensuring Sustainability Chapter 4
2. Structure Appropriately
You may have noticed that in the previous sections we continually stressed the importance of open partnerships, stakeholder engagement, and the role of champions. These ingredients initially flourish in an open and unstructured environment, based on loose connections between preexisting organizations that are usually capable of managing the first activities on behalf of the broader partnership. At some point however, the need usually emerges to give that specific partnership its own institutional structure. Understanding when is the right moment to take this step and the nature of the structure to provide – its level of autonomy, governance structure, openness, etc. – is critical to the success of your citizen-driven innovation strategy.
We cannot tell you exactly the right moment to act or the right structure to adopt, but we can highlight some of the issues to be taken into consideration when the question arises. Be aware of the special nature of more or less spontaneous, 'self-organized' partnerships that can have very fragile dynamics. As a city Mayor or administrator, you are used requiring some kind of institutional form in order to be able to act on any initiative. All too often, however, creative networks can collapse as they move towards a legal structure which inevitably leads to drawing boundaries, distinguishing the financial resources of potential associates, and so forth.
We therefore suggest you adopt a gradual approach towards institutionalization. A first step can be to create an open partnership that may require no legal form at all, using instead a simple multi-stakeholder Memorandum of Understanding. Signatories can jointly commit to collaboration with the aim of co-designing innovative city services, adhering to a set of ethical principles such as the rules you defined in the early stages of your partnership building process. Individual projects requiring the management of financial resources can be carried out with specific agreements among the contracting parties.
Box 29
The Art of the Mou
Several European projects, notably the CentraLab project and its Budapest Manifesto, have specifically addressed different ways of designing Memoranda of Understanding for Living Lab innovation partnerships, based on the exploration and experimentation of different governance models.
Case Story
City Innovation Agency in Helsinki
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Challenges |
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Forum Virium Helsinki (FVH)54 is an innovation unit within the Helsinki City organization playing a key role in implementing Helsinki's Smart and Open City strategy. The mission of FVH is defined as follows: 'FVH is an innovator and an initiator of new kind of cooperation between companies, public sector organizations and citizens. The aim is to create internationally competitive services that are based on the real needs of users." |
In early 2006, Forum Virium Helsinki (FVH) was established by ten ICT companies to boost innovation and digital business development through public-private-collaboration. The concept was then taken up by the City of Helsinki, where it was seen as a novel approach to develop more user-driven (and cost-effective) services for the citizens.55 Forum Virium Helsinki Ltd is a subsidiary (limited company) owned by the City of Helsinki. FVH's official partners are its five anchor companies, five other partner companies, and six public sector partners, including the Ministry of Transport and Communications, the Innovation Funding Agency for Tekes, and VTT Technical Research Center. |
There is a strong need today for cities to find new efficient ways to support technology management, innovations, and novel sources for growth through open innovation mechanisms, especially in the interface of public, private, and citizen collaboration. |
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Actions |
Results |
Impacts |
Scaling Up |
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The main form of Forum Virium's operations is concrete development projects, carried out within five program areas: Smart City, Innovative Public Procurement, New Forms of Media, Wellbeing, and Innovation Communities. These themes are cross-cutting, and a cross-sectorial approach is actively promoted in order to find new innovative solutions. |
FVH has evolved to 31 personnel by the end of 2013 (17 in 2010). Some key results of FVH include: pioneering the Open Data movement in Finland, bringing new tools to manage technological change, changing the way citizens interact with the city, changing the way the city cooperates with developers, contributing to Helsinki's international reputation as a Smart City, disseminating new knowledge into the Finnish innovation ecosystem, and strengthening Helsinki's international networks' use of funding opportunities. |
FVH has attained the most important impacts with projects that have had strong commitment from all the key participants. For instance, Helsinki Region Infoshare (HRI), a joint initiative by four cities in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, already lists more than 1,000 open datasets covering a range of topics. |
Sharing new insights and transfer of knowledge is a key value proposition of FVH. Scaling up is also boosted by fostering strong synergies among individual projects both locally and nationally (i.e. with the new joint 6AIKA strategy for Finland's six largest cities) and internationally, through networks such as ENoLL. |
As partners consolidate their collaborative practices and goals through a series of successful projects, the need to give a permanent and financially sustainable structure to the partnership will emerge, if at all, with the agreement of those involved. At that point, the legal structure simply gives a more permanent form to principles already validated, roles and commitments already tested, and common goals defined through the sum of initiatives already undertaken.