Pilot-based Innovation Ecosystems for Smart Cities

The importance of cities to the future of humanity and the planet at large is much greater than it may initially seem. Cities produce approximately three-quarters of global emissions, consume a similar percentage of energy and primary raw materials, and, through their environment, determine the quality of life of the three-quarters of the European Union’s population who call cities their home. Challenges such as adaptation to climate change, energy transformation, and ensuring sustainable mobility cannot be definitively solved without a radical transformation of cities. To make this happen, innovation is needed not only in the form of technology, but also in our collective mindset and processes. In many cases, the introduction of ground-breaking innovations encounter significant roadblocks to being able to put them into practice. In particular, innovative solutions proposed to municipalities encounter many financial, administrative, and information barriers to entry towards the beginning of their introduction. This, in turn, dissuades companies from taking on and expanding innovative projects that have the potential to save our planet and improve lives of citizens.

The PilotInnCities consortium’s answer to this problem is the agile piloting method. The Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic first learned about this method through cooperation with the Policy Learning Platform of the Interreg Europe program, which culminated in a learning mission to Helsinki in April 2023. Agile piloting consists in supporting small innovation experiments in which the solution provider, the municipality, and a third party (which takes the investment risk for the sake of the common good) collaborate to bring innovative solutions to the market. The composition of this partnership allows for extraordinary agility through limited-scale with significantly reduced bureaucracy. The agile piloting method well aligns with the Pareto principle: it is an activity that requires very low investments, but offers a robust positive impact for them with the potential to gradually transform the entire innovation environment.

Despite the limited-scale of its initial adoption, the agile piloting method maintains an ability to illustrate each innovative solution’s practical benefit, possible business model, and expansion strategy based on good practice sharing. This paves the way for upscaling and prevents multiple entities from reinventing the wheel independently. At the same time, the agile pilot becomes the center of ecosystem cooperation, where the experiment in a living laboratory actively involves the local community, as well as expertise and capacity from the nearest universities, innovation centers, and other regional and national institutions. In this way, each collaborative actor learns about the strength of their synergism, which allows them to more seamlessly work together towards a better world for us all, through a betterment of our cities. A true quadruple helix.