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
Policies - Demand-Driven Innovation
Description
Ensuring support for innovation is a difficult task, since innovation is by definition difficult to plan for and even more difficult to predict. Public policy instead requires neutrality, certainty, and predictability. Experimentation with new policy and funding mechanisms includes new approaches towards policy making processes on the one hand, and new funding procedures and instruments on the other.Use
Innovation policy traditionally supports the 'supply' side by funding research and development in areas deemed to yield scientific advances and market results. Demand-driven innovation policies, where the processes are driven by the end beneficiaries rather than researchers, instead aim to ensure greater relevance and better and faster uptake. In addition, they generally integrate technical and non-technical or social innovation and thus promote citizen engagement and creative thinking about alternative ways to provide services and address problems.Typologies
Demand-driven innovation policies are being experimented at nearly all different levels of the policy making process:The European Commission is defining regional innovation strategies for 2014-2020 (Smart Specialization) based on broad engagement, integration of social innovation, and 'entrepreneurial discovery' to identify hidden potentials.
At the operational level, alternatives to the traditional call for tenders include conditionalities such as the inclusion of end users as well as multi-step calls that identify innovation demand before funding projects.
Business promotion includes loan guarantees, local support to Venture Capital, and leveraging crowdfunding platforms.
Finally, Pre-Commercial Procurement is a multistep process through which the public sector transforms its own procurement needs into innovation processes.
Issues
Several issues arise with demand-driven innovation policy, first of which the need to address conflicts of interest through transparency rather than regulations. In addition, citizen-driven innovation is often represented by spontaneous networks that are difficult to fund. Finally, new procedures encounter the resistance of public officials wary of administrative innovations.Implementation
Policy innovations are best introduced through pilot testing, or the experimentation of new approaches on a small scale and with broad engagement of stakeholders before integrating into practice. Pilot testing helps identify potential pitfalls and define the appropriate procedures and roles.Policies - Demand-Driven Innovation
Cases
271 regional governments across Europe are currently defining their Smart Specialisation strategies with different degrees and types of policy innovation. Notable examples include the Uusimaa-Helsinki Region(Finland), applying a vision of the region as an innovation ecosystem; the Basque
Country (Spain) integrating social and territorial innovation; and the Apulia Region
(Italy) adopting innovative procedures to fund Living Labs. These strategies also include different innovations in policy instruments.
Pre-Commercial Procurement has been promoted by the European Commission since 2009 and is by now adopted in many R&D projects as well as regional innovation programs.