Open Innovation 2.0 Yearbook 2013 - European Commission - Europa

40 O P E N I N N O V A T I O N 2 0 1 3
form the backbone of future connected urban and
regional innovation ecosystems.
Smart cities and social innovation
It is also clear that a smart city strategy involves
many actors, organisations, communities and clusters.
The strategy should achieve a shared vision,
flagship projects, and collaboration. For that, topdown
planning and bottom-up initiatives should
complement each other [18]. Urban development
and planning has been dominated by top-down
‘blueprint’ approaches since long ago. At the same
time, there have always been ‘grass-roots’ developments
based on empowering neighbourhoods and
communities of citizens. These grass-roots developments
have now become considerably stronger,
as they are currently supported by a wide spectrum
of social media/Web 2.0 technologies. Whereas the
smart city visionary approach still provides inspiration
as a target scenario, there is a need to consider
real and daily-life problems and issues, to foster
grass-roots movements aiming to empower citizens,
neighbourhoods and businesses, and to push
for ‘social innovation’.
Social and technical infrastructures form one of
the key determinants of the future welfare of cities.
A creative population, infrastructure and institutions
for education and innovation, networks of collaboration
between businesses and governments,
the role of active and demanding citizens, businesses
and authorities to push for innovation and
quality of services are the other important determinants.
In analogy to Michael Porter’s concept of
national competitive advantage, the welfare potential
of cities and urban areas depends on factors
such as human resources, capital, infrastructure
and information, on demand conditions (the citizen),
urban networks of industries and entrepreneurs,
and on the role of local government. This also has
implications for the smart city concept itself. The
smart city is not the future urban scenario but is
about how citizens are empowered, through the
use of widespread technologies, for contributing to
urban change and realising their ambitions. In this
sense, the city constitutes what is called, in different
terms, an ‘urban laboratory’, ‘urban innovation
ecosystem’, ‘Living Lab’, or ‘agent of change’.
In this context, the concept of Living Labs as open
and user-driven innovation looks well positioned to
serve as a mediating, exploratory and participative
playground combining Future Internet ‘push’
and urban policy ‘pull’ in demand-driven cycles of
experimentation and innovation. Living-Lab-driven
innovation ecosystems may evolve to constitute
the core of ‘4P’ (public–private–people partnership)
ecosystems. Hence, it would provide opportunities
to citizens and businesses to co-create, explore,
experiment and evaluate innovative scenarios based
on technology platforms such as Future Internet
experimental facilities involving SMEs and large
companies as well as stakeholders from different
disciplines. However, in order to fulfil their promise
as a key element of urban innovation ecosystems,
many Living Labs should mature and become professional
in terms of their ‘business model’ and
‘business process management’ service offerings
and capabilities to create networks and orchestrate
collaboration among a wide diversity of actors such
as SMEs, citizen user groups, larger companies, policy
actors and research laboratories.
Open access in open
innovation ecosystems
A promising strategy to foster innovation ecosystems
in urban areas is to ensure open access to
innovation resources. Innovation resources include
test beds, Living Lab facilities and services, access
to user communities, technologies and know-how,
open data and more. Such resources can be potentially
shared in open innovation environments.
Evidence of collaboration models for sharing innovation
resources such as the use of Living Lab
facilities and methods in experimenting on Future
Internet technologies and the use of Living Lab
methodologies for implementing innovation policies
of cities is growing [17]. However, the potential
types and structures of these collaboration frameworks
and the concrete issues to be resolved in
sharing research and innovation resources, such as
governance, ownership, access, transferability and
interoperability, need further examination, development
and piloting in future projects.
A promising area of work in this respect is ‘connected
cities’, addressing issues such as how different
cities in a region, or in different regions, can
have access to the services provided by assets or
resources hosted elsewhere. And, what kind of new
services can be foreseen building on this concept
of common, geographically distributed assets (e.g.
test bed and Living Lab services for innovators
in smart cities). There already exist examples of
emerging bodies integrating a technology test bed
and a Living Lab, such as ImaginLab in the region
of Bretagne in France, which is an open platform
dedicated to experimentation, from integration and
interoperability testing to usability evaluation for
new products and services on fixed and mobile networks
(FTTH and 4G LTE). To some extent, projects
dedicated to Future Internet experimentation and
dedicated to Living Labs innovation may interact
with, and even integrate into, hybrid models. Such