During Connected Smart Cities conference, summit held on January 21^st in Brussels and co-organised by ENoLL and OASC in the context of FIWARE, ENoLL ran a session entitled “Living Labs and Open Innovation”

During Connected Smart Cities conference, summit held on January 21^st in Brussels and co-organised by ENoLL and OASC in the context of FIWARE, ENoLL ran a session entitled “Living Labs and Open Innovation”. The session had the goal to explore different governance models for smart cities and how Living Labs principles could support urban development. More than 120 people registered to the session and followed presentations from a few experts in the fields of smart cities, Living Labs, IoT and more. The session was organised and coordinated by Ana Garcia, Director of ENoLL. 

During the workshop’s first part three EC officials representing DG CNECT kick-started discussion: Olavi Luotonen, Bror Salmelin and Vassilis Tsanidis. They delivered a historical overview of main initiatives laying the foundations for Open and Agile Smart Cities initiative, but they also stressed the importance of creating new markets, products and services in the smart city field and explained innovation procurement (both PCP and PPI actions). 

After the Commission’s representatives Marita Holst came on stage, Botnia LL director and ENoLL Effective member. She introduced the Living Lab topic and Living Lab key principles for sustainable smart cities. In her view user-centred innovation applied to urban development can lead to the development of better business models, more desired products/services and openness in terms of boosted innovation capacity (picture below). 

After this first session, a second wave went on stage and Hugo Gonçalves from Forum Virium Helsinki started by introducing the SELECT for Cities, a PCP project that considers cities as large-scale IoT Labs and aims to put IoT into practice.

Jarmo Eskelinen from Forum Virium Helsinki (picture below) followed up by overviewing project Pilots aiming to build foundations of a Digital City: the IoT Lab by iMinds in Antwerp, the Copenaghen Solutions Lab and its Street Lab and the Smart Kalasatama innovation neighbourhood in Helsinki.

Marita Holst and Anna Stahlbrost from Botnia Living Lab then presented their action on Smart Cities, from the first smart city project in 2000 on mobile marketing to more recent initiatives on winter biking down to Organicity, brand new project developing a platform to experiment smart city solutions.

Then a number of city cases were analysed: Louise Overgaard from City of Aarhus then overviewed a few citizen-driven activities in her city, and Olha Bondarenko from City of Eindhoven presented Eindhoven’s post-Philips innovation journey where the city has become a Living Lab in itself developing projects like smart lighting grid in crucial areas of the city (see picture).

The topic of creative industries was tackled by Ingrid Willems from CreatiFI/the Creative Ring. This initiative aims to stimulate co-creative experimentations towards commercially viable Future Internet Businesses. 59 projects have already been funded, more will through a second open call and all these companies are networked through the Creative Ring to collaborate at international level.

Finally Mikael Grannas, Mayor of the city of Seppo, concluded the session by giving a review of the innovation triangle in public sector and admitting how hard and fascinating it is to develop a smart city involving all actors and including all needed components.

The session attracted a large audience that followed all presentations with interest and curiosity. Session agenda provided audience with many stimuli, touching upon several city-focused themes.