Open Source Cities

Open Source Cities spoke with Sascha Haselmayer, General Director and Co-Founder of Living Labs Global about the Living Labs Global Award and incentivizing service innovation in cities through competitions and open source citizen engagement.

Background
The Living Labs Global Award is an open competition for technology solutions to urban challenges posed by a group of global cities. Finalists are selected and showcased on CityMart, a growing online marketplace of ideas, applications and urban strategies available for any city to copy or adapt. In 2012, the awards ceremony will be held in Rio de Janeiro in conjunction with the Rio Summit on Service Innovation in Cities.

The Living Labs Global Award is very impressive and ambitious in scope, with a large number of countries included in the program. How did Living Labs Global develop the format and concept for the competition?

In 2008 we put the first Showcase online – 35 solutions that could help cities, since there seemed to be no other resource. Thousands of users from around the world were accessing this simple catalogue. At the same time, our work in Living Labs Global focused on helping high impact technologies spread across cities and we found the same disconnect over-and-over: cities do not announce their problems, and as a result innovative businesses do not find the market with the right need among the 557,000 communities around the world.

So we ran a little experiment in 2009; 10 – 12 cities published one challenge each with the promise to evaluate the submissions and pick a winner. We found a formula to overcome spending and procurement issues by focusing on the common interest by cities and companies to pilot solutions. Whilst the winners get no money, they get the institutional support of the city to make something happen.

It worked. CitySolver, for example, won our Award in Barcelona last year and within 6 months had completed a pilot and sold their solution. This saved them 24 months in acquisition time and a lot of wasted meetings with cities that would not be interested.

So now, in our third year, we have 21 cities and around 500 entries and the prospect of a wonderful Summit in Rio de Janeiro to bring the innovators and cities together to take things forward.

CitySolver, one of the winners of the 2011 Living Labs Global Awards.

It’s admirable that you include smaller cities and capitals from the developing world in your program. In the global discussion around the idea of “smart cities”, much of the attention is focused on large, well-established and highly developed megacities, usually in wealthy nations. How did you pick cities like Birmingham, Caceres, Coventry, Derry-Londonderry, Guadalajara, Kristiansand, Lavasa, Sant Cugat and Terrassa to participate and what lessons do you think they can offer your larger partner cities like Barcelona, Cape Town, Hamburg, Mexico, Rio de Janeiro and San Francisco?

We try to create a cross-section as to what challenges cities around the world face each year. We interviewed 250 cities to select the 21, and our selection criteria are fairly simple, but effective and focus on whether the city shares our vision to open its market, whether it can commit to a challenge and to piloting the winner.

Sant Cugat is an excellent case of a smaller city that inspires bigger cities. Since 2005 we are working with the city to consider technology as an enabler for a new governance and service model in the city. The Mayor at the time, Lluis Recoder and his team were committed to re-thinking how a local government for 80,000 citizens should work and as a result not only managed to export their innovation and management models to Eindhoven and Barcelona, but also win the most prestigious European Award for public sector leadership and innovation, as well as the title of “Most Transparent City in Spain” for 3 years running by Transparency International.

Smaller cities are often more agile since departments are smaller and our technology community found these to be very effective partners to get things moving. Bigger cities are starting to watch carefully and Barcelona, through its 22@Barcelona Innovation District, even emulated this effect by dedicating a district to become its more agile urban lab.

You are holding the awards ceremony this May in Rio de Janeiro in conjunction with the Rio Summit on Service Innovation in Cities. The following month, the U.N. Rio+2 meeting will be held, gathering global leaders to assess a sustainable development agenda entitled “The Future We Want”. Do you think that global policymakers could learn from how cities innovate in an entrepreneurial, grass-roots way?

Innovation is not just something for our top leaders, but becomes successful when it becomes day- to-day. What I mean is that Mayors and Presidents come and go, as do their declarations that trigger new priorities. Yet it is the organisations, the countless project leaders and managers, that take 90% of the decisions on a day-to-day basis. How can we motivate them to take more inspired decisions that draw confidence of experiences by peers elsewhere? San Francisco has 800 technology pioneers among its employees. Aren’t these the people that can change the city, and how can we provide them the daily market intelligence to take better decisions? That is why we think CityMart.com is such a powerful tool to develop this marketplace and connect the hundreds of pioneers in each city to a global community.

At the same time, corporate leaders draw the big picture of how we can respond to mega-trends. But next to them we alone have identified 4,000 innovative solution providers that have ground- breaking technologies, service and business models to improve the lives of our citizens today. Few of those require big architectures or infrastructures, since their resources were always limited. Cities should be able to take informed decisions on how to construct their smartness – combining big strokes with agile solutions.

The open government data movement is growing rapidly, with major cities releasing data sets for programmers and the public to analyze and bring to life via mobile apps and data visualizations. At the same time, there are emerging issues around the quality and provenance of some of this data. Having run this competition for several years, have you seen open data become an important part of the process of service innovation for cities?

We tried so hard to involve the open data community! For example, we contacted most participants in the “Apps for…” competitions to share their apps with our cities. 95% said they in fact are not interested and not in the business of what their app offered. Instead, they thought the App was a cool thing to do – either as a marketing stunt or a donation of spare time. So we found, like many cities by now, that we need to create sustainable eco-systems to run services based on open data. If your apps have no business model that scales across many cities, you are unlikely to see it maintained.

Data quality is another major issue. I believe that London’s much-hyped Datastore has a budget of less than $20,000. And this is reflected in the data quality – just releasing data sets is not going to trigger sustained change or innovation. The best example of the possibilities is what Astando and the City of Stockholm did with e-Adept, a solution that enables blind and visually impaired people to navigate the city freely entirely on the basis of high-quality data. Open or not, the city is deploying this data to a transformative purpose that at an annual cost of $500,000 generates direct economic benefits of $20,000,000.

ICT companies like IBM, Cisco, Oracle and others see “smart cities” as a strategic growth opportunity to bring technology solutions and improved efficiency to all manner of infrastructure systems. What technologies, big or small, are you most excited about in terms of their potential to make cities more livable?

Technologies like e-Adept are truly transformative, and yet they fall right outside the Smart City debate. 383,000 New Yorkers would see their lives transformed by this technology overnight, and the economic savings are astronomical. And yes, they flourish on some pretty amazing Oracle Smart City technologies but are also the result of the organisational commitment to break-down traditional structures and exploit these to the full, with ideas from agile businesses like Astando.

The sharing economy is another area where we see a lot of activities. Companies like Airbnb, Park-at-my-house, Spotscout, WhipCar, BuzzCar and Couchsurfing see a lot of growth and as citizens appear to trust technology-enabled sharing, this could re-define our perception of ownership and public space in cities in very inspiring ways.

Lastly, the future of urban lighting is fascinating. San Francisco thought they were upgrading their 18,000 lamps with LEDs and a wireless control system when they realised that they were in fact laying the groundwork for the future intelligent public space. Digital lighting allows us to think in new ways about interactivity. Eindhoven is pioneering this with the help of Philips Design and many others in the Strijp-S district, where they are deploying completely new, intelligent lighting concepts that adapt to the citizen not just as a utility, but a cultural and ambient experience.

So many questions remain: Who owns all that data? Should the city operate sensors our should citizens opt-in by carrying their own sensors like City Senspods? What data do citizens need to aggregate to change towards healthier lifestyles and will our real-estate value change according to air quality, noise, and other data?