Smarter Cities

Our Goal

To help local governments, city administrations and municipalities:

• Map their own administration innovation ecosystem.
• Identify development opportunities in priority areas for administrations and citizens.
• Develop innovation agendas and road-maps based on existing internal innovation drivers.
• Build smarter public-private partnerships and new funding mechanisms based on incremental development and quick wins.
• Make their programs and cities smarter places to live.

To help urban tech companies:

• Design and implement co-development innovation strategies with local governments, city administrations and municipalities
• Design and implement impact assessment systems.

How do we achieve our goal 

Phase 1: Innovation Mapping

We work with local governments, city administrations and municipalities to study and document how innovation from within public structures and agencies are making urban systems smarter and shaping people’s lives, how these structures have been adapting to and adopting new data and technology innovations to make their management systems more inclusive and responsive to decision making and citizens, their success, failures and replicability.

See example: NYC Innovation Cluster 

Phase 2: Innovation Roadmaps

We produce case studies and innovation roadmaps to help local governments, city administrations and municipalities reimagine new possibilities for their services and programs, for their public-private partnerships and for co-development with the private sector, academia, civil society and neighboring cities and municipalities.

See example: Open Data and Small Business Development

See example: Institutionalizing Analytic Excellence 

Phase 3: Smarter Programs

We apply our Becoming Smarter Framework (BSF) to help local governments, city administrations and municipalities, as well as their public structures and agencies, become smarter.

• Leadership
• Legislation
• Organizational structure
• Networks
• Technology
• Data
• Results

See example: The Circular City Public-Private Partnership for New Lab

See example: Circular City Research Program

Where

Current initiatives include single-city program with New York City (U.S.), multiple-city program with Lisboa, Cascais, Fundacao and Mafra (Portugal) and city-cluster program in the Pearl River Delta (China) (in design phase).