Government as a Platform for Open Innovation Key to Creating Sustainable Cities

8/2/2019 Government as a Platform for Open Innovation Key to Creating Sustainable Cities

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Generated by Jive SBS on 2012-02-25-07:00

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Government as a Platform for OpenInnovation Key to Creating Sustainable Cities

The way government functions must change, says Esteve Almirall, a professor andresearcher at ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Spain, who focuses on the intersection

of innovation and information technology. He says to create sustainable cities, governments

must move from being the sole providers of services to becoming the platforms for open

innovation. The Smart Connected Communities Institute recently spoke with Almirall to

discuss his views about how new approaches to government can aid the development of

sustainable cities.

Why is open innovation important for sustainable cities?

Esteve Almirall: We may be seeing the end of a model in how government works.

To reach the vision of the sustainable city, you have to reinvent everything.

Theres no way to succeed with the old approach to city governance. People

not only want new services but also more diverse ones that can speak to the

needs of every community. Governments cant keep up with demands now, and

it will only become more difficult in the future. It is similar to what is happening

in corporations. Relying on innovation produced internally is no longer enough

to compete effectively. Corporations have realized they need ecosystems ofinnovation that reach beyond their organization to succeed.

Just applying technology is not going to solve sustainability problems

in cities. Governments need to stop thinking about what services they should

supply and instead focus on ways to open up governments so the market,

citizens and communities can create and provide the right services. Thats the

platform approach. Ultimately, theres no way for government to anticipate what

will really be successful. The only way to know for sure is to test in real life. And

the preferred way to do that is through open innovation. The future needs to be

co-invented.

How can a city carry out open innovation?
http://www.esade.edu/


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Government as a Platform for Open Innovation Key to Creating Sustainable Cities


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Esteve Almirall: Government should facilitate paths for involvement in the

provisioning of public services and provide spaces where experimentation can

happen. Barcelona, for example, is creating urban labs. In this case, Barcelona

city hall provides the context and the opportunity, offering companies and

communities the possibility to experiment with new approaches in small but

real-life areas of the city. So far we have 49 different projects exploring ways toimprove the sustainability of the city, such as motorbike sharing, e-cars and LED

lighting. Companies provide the means while the city provides the space and the

opportunity to involve city officials and citizens in the project but without any

commitment by the city to buy the resulting product.

Open data is another example of this idea. Twenty years ago, governments were the

only ones providing weather information, but by opening up access to that data to private

companies, we now have much better sources of weather information through a vast variety

of services and applications. We are now seeing this same process occurring with city maps

and transportation information.

In the future, a sensor network run by a city that tracks pollution, for example, could

lead to all kinds of applications that could inform and inspire people to act more responsibly.

These examples are just the beginning of how public services can improve through an open

innovation approach to city services. All this wealth of applications is not going to come

from the public sector solely but from ecosystems that the public sector has to learn how to

manage and incent.

What are the key components of open innovation in cities?

Esteve Almirall: Open innovation in the public sector is going to be different from the

implementations that we have seen in the private sector. As an example, take the role of

citizens compared to the one of consumers. Citizens are not only the receivers of innovation

but also the owners of the city. Open innovation in smart cities is still a concept under

exploration, but it is clearly not a problem that will be solved with top-down technological

solutions only.

Innovation management in cities has to be reinvented and this implies an

important change in the mentality of government. Open innovation in the public

sector will revolve more around managing platforms and ecosystems than on

licensing intellectual property (as has been the case in the private sector).

Cities can build on the resources that the control, such as public data, sensor

networks and fiber networks. By opening them to public access cities create a


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new mechanism to spur open innovation. Certainly, open innovation requires

ground rules, which is where the city plays its role. Governance, setting up the

means for revenue sharing, protecting privacy, and managing incentives and

motivations would be the platform part of governments role in open innovation.

Open innovation in cities will also build a lot on spurring and managing networks. Insteadof having one closed-off entity (government) responsible for creating all public services, you

involve many more people. The more people become involved, the greater the exchange of

ideas and information, which can greatly help in fostering innovation.

How can open innovation produce better results than groups of experts working on

the same problems?

Esteve Almirall: When you understand the problem very well, then the expert

approach is best. This is often the case with medical doctors or engineers.

The methods for addressing a fever or designing a strong building have been

thoroughly identified and established. But the challenge with sustainable cities

is that no one knows for sure what the best solutions are. The majority of the

problems are open ended and no one has solved them before. Also, many of

these issues wont be solved with incremental improvements. Things will need

to be totally reinvented and that requires all-new thinking that likely wont come

from the established ways of doing things.

How should cities finance open innovation?

Esteve Almirall: Financing is certainly a challenge. Only the biggest IT

vendors have been able to invest in traditional city projects. If smaller

companies cant participate in an open innovation program, then that

defeats the goal of the program to bring in an ecosystem of ideas. So tocompensate for this, open innovation in the public sector requires some

public investment. Unfortunately, with the economic recession and

budget problems faced by most cities, theres little money for these

experimental efforts.


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However, many open innovation efforts dont require a lot of money.

Sometimes you need a lot of money, sometimes you dont. It just depends.

Software applications, in particular, are not expensive. Also, communities of

passionate users can be a great resource. And often theres funding from other

public sources besides city governments.

One way to help facilitate investments by the private sector and to pool city

resources is to create a big enough market by looking at solutions that would be

useful to a wide variety of cities. Thats one of the reasons behind a new three-

year project sponsored by the European Union. Five cities, including Helsinki,

Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris and Barcelona, are using living labs methodologies

coupled with crowd sourcing (involving citizens), open data, open sensor network

data, and fiber networks to develop new tools and approaches for creating

sustainable cities throughout Europe. If one city gets a good idea, it can share

the idea with others, providing a huge shortcut to innovation.

What is your outlook for open innovation in Europe?

Esteve Almirall: Unfortunately, my outlook for open innovation in Europe is mixed. There

are several issues. First, European cities have a difficult time sharing information, even

though the problems faced in Barcelona are likely very similar to those in Berlin or Rome.

European cities, unlike those in the United States, are much more separated by different

languages, nationalities, cultures and attitudes. Even within countries such as Spain, these

types of divisions exist.

Also, open innovation in Europe is challenged by all the governmental bureaucracy. This

makes it extra hard to get multiple government agencies and private organizations working

together. And it is not the best of times for these projects, given the economic crisis and

budget problems in most European cities.

But the good part of the equation is that everything needs to be invented for

sustainable cities, and cities recognize this and are eager to try and experiment.

They realize that they arent necessarily going the find the answers from the bigIT vendors that typically dominate city infrastructures. I think both in America

and Europe the concept of government as a platform is going to be big. Theres

an opportunity to develop solutions for groups of cities, which would greatly

lower the cost, time and challenges of deploying new approaches to creating

sustainable cities.

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Government as a Platform for Open Innovation Key to Creating Sustainable Cities