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?
Starter Pack
Technology Paradigm - Internet of Things / Cloud Computing
Description
Technology paradigms are based on an interrelated set of technologies that together define radically new scenarios of usage. Among the key technology paradigms underpinning the Smart City model are: Internet of Things (IoT), based on massively pervasive sensor networks that allow for a real-time awareness of urban phenomena, and Cloud Computing, based on the storage and elaboration of information in an internet-based service, so that access occurs through any connected device.
Use
Reaching an understanding of technology paradigms helps a city administration govern innovation processes, empowering a Mayor to participate actively in defining Smart City strategies together with the engineers and ICT providers who have a greater mastery of the functional and technical details. What is important is to grasp the broad vision and its political implications, understanding above all how citizen engagement can be ensured for implementation.
Typologies
The impact of the Living Lab approach can best be illustrated in terms of the two paradigms identified here. The Internet of Things concept is greatly enhanced if we consider 'citizens as sensors' by integrating what people see and hear in addition to taking advantage of diffused sensor networks. Cloud computing offers significant savings and convenience but also raises issues related to privacy and security; recent events underline how greater involvement of local governments, citizens, and businesses is essential.
Issues
As with the Smart City model itself, technology driven visions can provide a useful guiding framework but only by fully embedding new technologies in the practice and operations of a city, its institutions, and its people, can we say that the innovation process is effective. Technology infrastructures are the foundation of the Smart City vision but social and societal innovation are the real transformative factors; the main issue for city Mayors is to ensure the coherence between the two.
Implementation
Internet of Things / Cloud Computing
Cases
An energy saving project in Malmoe works with local residents to build their own electricity sensors, thus attaining a sense of ownership and greater impact.
Cloud computing platforms aim not only to allow for remote access to data and services, but they also provide basic underlying features and functionalities that make Smart City services easier to develop. In the EU's EPIC project, a Living Lab approach used for the co-design of an app for re-locating in a city helped define such security and privacy features in conjunction with specific pilot services.
Finally, the FI-WARE platform for the Future Internet offers a cloud-based infrastructure for Smart City services such as IoT, Open Data, and Big Data (making sense of massive amounts of information) applications.
Impact
Citizen-driven innovation processes are essential to help city governments master technology paradigms, understanding how they can really bring benefits to a city and its people. This changes the way citizens interact not only with new technologies but also with their city: whether they annotate bus stops, share touristic routes, or report potholes.