Re-Thinking Urban Innovation at its Core

Beyond just a buzzword we love throwing around in PowerPoints (see Exhibit A above) and keynote speeches, the term ‘innovation’ can even bring together talent from all over the world to address concrete sustainable development challenges.

This is exactly what the upcoming UNLEASH Lab in Denmark plans to do later this August, as 1,000 talents from 129 countries will come together to address the UN SDGs. As a representative of Israel, arguably one of the most innovative countries in the world, I believe I have both the obligation as well as the privilege to contribute to the discussions at this exciting innovation lab.

At this lab, I am specifically taking part in the urban sustainability theme, seeking to address today’s most pressing urban challenges. Israel itself is already a highly urbanized country, with an over 93% urbanization rate. Some of our cities, similar to other regions, are doubling and even tripling in size, thus demanding innovative strategies and solutions to address challenges associated with adequate housing, efficient infrastructure and urban services, sufficient open spaces, inequality gaps, and many more.

In my mind, realizing urban sustainability will require local innovation that follows a different approach, one that will call for synergetic cooperation among three main entities: (1) municipalities; (2) academia; and (3) the community and residents themselves. See below for a figure depicting this cooperation:

Source: SUiTS Ltd.

This approach is essentially re-thinking innovation in the urban domain at its core. Rather than a top down approach to smart city services, I, together with colleagues from SUiTS — Smarter Urban & iT Strategies Ltd., a private Israeli-based urban tech integrator, are calling for a move towards ‘challenge-based innovation’.

In this approach, mayors and senior utility figures will need to re-think their current management strategies and showcase certain criteria for transitioning towards smarter cities and more efficient systems.

This approach requires considering the following as a starting point:

• Local government dedication and commitment over the long-term → understanding that addressing organizational, regulatory and procurement challenges will require the formulation of a long-term strategy.
• Moving beyond ‘nice-to-have’ → being labeled a smart city is not (and should not be) the result of winning a competition, by solely installing sensors, or by simply holding a city hackathon. While these are all fun and exciting and most importantly to some, “make for good photo opps”, these initiatives are alone not tangible and sufficient enough to produce substantial results.
• Using data-based management systems to open up data and/or invite data → this will help determine the extent of challenges and which communities they impact, their specific location(s), as well as help define priority areas for inviting innovation to solve them.
• Designating a point-of-contact (POC) to take leadership within the municipality for innovation-based projects → this appointed individual will act as a point of reference for different municipal departments, the community, academia, as well as potential partners.
• Identifying areas within an urban locality that could serve as beta-sites/testing grounds for examining proposed solutions → Without a process of trial and error and professional validation of proposed solutions, innovation will unfortunately remain at a theoretical level.

I am looking forward to exploring these and other ideas to really propel our cities forward. My ultimate hope is for us to be proud of our cities’ efforts and work ambitiously and strategically towards improving the lives of city and slum dwellers worldwide by truly catering to their needs and empowering residents and local entrepreneurs to take an active part in addressing their own challenges. This will ultimately enable the communities themselves to play an active role in improving their daily lives, this increasing accountability.

To sum up, to progress in the field of urban sustainability and address this critical SDG, governments at the local (and the national level) will need to collaboratively work together with academia and entrepreneurs from within the community. It will be exciting to see if and how the international community will adopt this type of innovation thinking.

What are your thoughts about moving towards challenge-based urban innovation? I’d love to hear from you: shirley@thesuits.net