ENoLL will host a fringe session dedicated to Living Labs on March 11th at 9am entitled  “Open Innovation and Living Labs shaping the cities and regions of the future” at The Innovation Convention (March 10-11th, 2014 in Brussels). This session will investigate how Living Labs methods and best practices can help building a stronger innovation ecosystem in Europe.

Our session will be compromised of a panel discussion to be moderated by Mr. Jarmo Eskelinen (CEO of Forum Virium Helsinki, Chair European Network of Living Labs.)

featuring also;

• No Smart Cities without Creative Cities: The Creative Ring in Europe. Prof. Pieter Ballon, Director Living Labs and coordinator of Smart Cities at iMinds
• The city as a living lab: Barcelona’s initiative, Mr Artur Serra, Deputy director i2CAT & Ms Ines Garriga, Director of Creativity & Innovation of the City of Barcelona
• Human Smart Cities: The Lisbon case. Prof. Dr. Alvaro Oliveira, CEO Alfamicro
  Smart Cities & Communities; actions at a European level. Mr Axel Volkery, DG MOVE

The objective of this interactive session is to explore how living labs are supporting and can support cities and regions in embracing new technologies while facing the main societal challenges today.

Guided by existing initiatives and specific examples, this session will approach city and region innovation considering 4 different dimensions: the organisational perspective as a complex innovation ecosystems where new business models are required; the entrepreneurial perspective, as start-ups, developers and entrepreneurs have to overcome many barriers to benefit from the city ecosystem; the technical perspective (open data, cloud, IoT, security, etc); and the Human and citizen perspective. Involvement of the local innovation and creative communities, open platforms, current challenges in scaling initiatives and new governance models will be important aspects to tackle in this session.

The session will be enriched with the inputs from the European Innovation Partnership in Smart Cities and Communities (EIP SCC) & both representatives and the audience will be able to get more information about upcoming funding opportunities to support city innovation.

Don’t forget to check out the rest of the programme for the Innovation Convention and you must register in advance, it’s free!