Innovation Convention 2014 ENoLL Fringe Session Report

The EC’s annual Innovation Convention aims to create an innovation-friendly environment that makes it easier for great ideas to be turned into products and services that will bring our economy growth and jobs. The two day convention held in Brussels, provided a platform to debate and inform policies that will contribute towards building a strong research and innovation eco-system in Europe.

The EC’s annual Innovation Convention aims to create an innovation-friendly environment that makes it easier for great ideas to be turned into products and services that will bring our economy growth and jobs. The two day convention held in Brussels, provided a platform to debate and inform policies that will contribute towards building a strong research and innovation eco-system in Europe.

The European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) organised a fringe session during the Innovation Convention titled Open Innovation and Living Labs shaping the cities and regions of the future. This interactive session explored how living labs are supporting and can support cities and regions in embracing new technologies while facing todays main societal challenges.

In his opening speech, Jarmo Eskelinen, CEO of Forum Virium Helsinki, Chair of the European Network of Living Labs, explained how cities are falling behind as they do not innovate like companies do. The private sector has learnt to leverage mobile smart technology and provide us with many services & service platforms that have become invaluable to many. Meanwhile, the public sector has become less efficient in providing services and fallen behind the needs of its inhabitants. He explained that cities may have limited financial resources but by opening up their data they can pave the way to enable complementary city services, provided by external partners, helping to better serve citizens and aide cities in becoming more economically sustainable.

Building service infrastructure top down instead of bottom up is inefficient and not creating solutions that citizens are looking for. Mr Eskelinen highlighted that you can only make better services by testing them, and cities are not good at testing and interacting with citizens. This is where the role that Living Labs can and will play is key as they are contributing to bringing open and interoperable solutions for cities and real live innovation environments thus helping to build service infrastructure from the bottom up.

Finally, no one ever designed cities to be interoperable which means building service infrastructure is considerable more expensive than it needs to be. He presented the case of CitySDK, an EC funded project, pushing cities to share & collaborate. CitySDK harmonises city interfaces & provides better and easier ways for cities throughout the Europe to release their data in a format that is easy for the developers to re-use thus creating better services in multiple urban environments all over Europe.

Then, Prof. Pieter Ballon, Director Living Labs at and coordinator of Smart Cities at iMinds, presented that the creation of smart cities was not enough, that we also need to foster creativity & culture in our cities in order to make them places where citizens wanted to live. He explained that mobility & energy management are traditionally considered to be the most important aspects when building a smart city but you also need to have things happening in a smart city. As without people, businesses & creativity, a smart city would be a ghost town.

The creative industries have been reconsidered to be one of the drivers of economic growth rather than something that consumes the product of economic growth, producing 3.5% of EU GDP and employing 3% of the active EU population. Prof Ballon explained that the sector is dominated by micro businesses & independents/freelancers thus not always considered to be important as the activity happens normally in small units. There are many problems in the sector concerning developing sustainable business models, accessing Future Internet tools, & scalability as they are so locally routed. Fortunately, the Creative Ring is a new project that will work on building & developing answers to these problems. The project aims to turn cities into creative labs through building a network & infrastructure to support the creative industries by forming communities, developing tools, providing access to physical spaces & facilitating co-creation.

Georges Niland, policy advisor at EUROCITIES, then addressed how we can use ICT as enabler to overcome current city challenges. It has long been highlighted that there is a need for a new approach as citizens are increasingly connected and they are wanting fast & transparent responses to their questions. Speed or efficiency of service are also not generally associated with local authorities meaning that citizens are continually frustrated by the lack of information available to them in city environments. Mr Niland stated that there is therefore a need for city governments to be earlier adopters of technological innovations & develop collaborative public services that are more intune with the general public however this is not easy due to contrainments regarding procurement rules & internal regulations.

He explained that in order to meet current challenges, cities have need to consider adopting certain enabling tools like e-gov services in order to provide quicker & smoother administration procedures. For him, adopting an open data approach will also prove to be invaluable as releasing data in a meaningful way allows service developers to create apps & services (thus releasing some of the pressure from the public service infrastructure directly provided by the cities) & it also serves a civic good whereby citizens can use the data to visualize the happenings in their city. Using ICT as an enable creates bottom up economic & social value for cities and ensures that cities maintain a reactive & proactive approach to developing services. Mr Niland closed by highlighting that in order to ensure sustainability with these new ecosystems, cities need to engage actively with living labs and business incubators as these are at the heart of new idea development.

EUROCITIES has also published an opendata guidebook, a resource for cities that are starting out on the path to open data and are looking for knowledge and experience from those local authorities that have already done so.

Artur Serra, deputy director i2CAT, presented the case of Barcelona, the city as a living lab. This was a very interesting case to present in light of Barcelona being awarded the iCapital prize (European Capital of Innovation 2014) that afternoon at the Convention. For Mr Serra cities need innovation policies and in Barcelona they have gone as far as to make innovation as a way of life.

Mr Serra opened with the story that the first attempt to create an innovative and smart Barcelona was a failure. Inspired by Silicon Valley in the US, they brought together a concentration of companies & big corporations in an old industrial neighbourhood, 22@, that was in need of rehabilitation. The creative industries were excluded and as a consequence this regenerated neighbourhood failed to flourish proving yet again how creativity & innovation go hand in hand.

He went onto explain that the second attempt was much more successful as they considered the city as a whole rather than just individual neighbourhoods. The first step was to put the environmental, urban planning & ict departments together in order to facilitate collective decisions and conversations about building a smart city under the collective name of “Urban Habitat” department. Barcelona worked hard on creating a city of smart citizens by embracing the fab lab movement and went one step further in creating a network of maker labs. They also created a city operating systems – by approaching a city like a computer, and just like a computer needs an operating system so does a city, Barcelona one single infrastructure rather than a network of disconnected city infrastructures. Cities themselves have never really had innovation policies and have depended on the regional or national policy which was maybe too abstract too distant to apply to the case of a particular city. Mr Serra closed by highlighting key developments for the future of innovation in the city as Barcelona has just created a DG of creativity & innovation in order to maintain an up to date and relevant innovation policy in the city. Labs have been identified as the future key for innovation success in Barcelona and the city will continue to develop & adapt the concept for its citizens.

Prof. Alvaro Oliveira, CEO Alfamicro, then presented the case of Lisbon & Human Smart Cities. Another major highlighted problems in our cities is that of isolation & social exclusion and if we really want to create bottom up innovation we need up facilitate citizen participation. Technology is a great tool and in the case of a human smart city should be used to connect and engage governments and citizens.

He illustrated the human case by presenting the MyNeighbourhood project, a project that considers the neighbourhood scale the most promising one in creating smart cities as it already proved in the past to be effective creating healthy, secure, liveable, happy cities. MyNeighbourhood works using the “win” methodology – working with the Wishes, Interests & Needs of the citizens and empowers them in the co creation of new city services. Interaction is key in building a human smart city and creating interdependency and connectivity between people and their places helps makes this interaction even more possible. It is therefore important to take the virtual community and transfer it to a human physical community to further strengthen the interactions between citizens.

Prof Oliveira closed by highlighting that in order to guarantee the success of the smart city movement it is important to ensure the convergence of existing policy mechanisms.

The session was greatly enriched by a final presentation from the European Innovation Partnership in Smart Cities and Communities (EIP SCC) & both representatives and the audience were able to get more information about upcoming funding opportunities to support city innovation. Participants heard about the current Invitation for Commitments (open until June 15th 2014) which invites all stakeholders, to step forward and support the objectives of the EIP by communicating and sharing their ideas and plans for actions at the interface of energy, transport and information and communication technologies. The Invitation for Commitments is distinct and independent from Calls under Horizon 2020; it is not a funding instrument but it aims to create visibility and build a dynamic marketplace for innovation exchange and partnering.

The session closed with a dynamic question and answer session with the audience where they were keen to discover more about the concrete city examples given during the presentations & also learn about the roles universities had to play in building smart cities and their collaboration with living labs.

Videos of the presentations are available here and the slides are also available here.