World Bank, ENoLL Strengthen Cooperation on Open Innovation: The Living Lab Handbook for Cities

ENoLL’s “living lab” model offers the World Bank a new approach to tackle development challenges. The collaboration will concretize in the form of a handbook for Smart Cities, with a specific focus on policy-makers and other stakeholders wishing to improve public service delivery leveraging existing technologies and open innovation techniques.

There is growing recognition that finding new solutions to today’s most pressing development challenges requires going beyond the realm of government experts and traditional partners. To keep up with the rapid pace of innovation, new approaches are needed for engaging the private sector, academia, and civil society in developing, implementing, and scaling up the best ideas.

One such open innovation methodology is the “living lab” model, an experimental environment where users and producers co-create new information and communication technology (ICT) approaches. In a living lab, age-old problems around access to information about clean water, school performance, or health care are no longer solved exclusively by institutional experts, but by networks of actors engaging and co-creating with users in a creative social space.

On July 10 2012, the World Bank signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL). The agreement between the World Bank and ENoLL brings global expertise in the area of user-driven ICT to help the World Bank and its clients improve public services, increase civic participation, advance public administrative capacity, and drive green growth. And it will help the two institutions further their shared goal of finding new approaches to improving the public services that affect the everyday lives of millions of people in developing countries.

With over 330 living labs, ENoLL members are transforming citizen-centered innovation and data-driven government. Several actions and activities have been jointly developed between the ENoLL members and the World Bank. Representatives of the World Bank joined the ENoLL Summer School 2013 (with strong focus on City Innovation) held last August in Manchester  and offered a key note speech during the Living Lab World Wide Conference day (video).

This collaboration has lead to the development of a handbook/toolkit for Smart Cities. The World Bank and ENoLL publicly announced the production of a Living Lab toolkit for Cities during the World Bank event “CitiSense”  held in Barcelona, November 2013.

The Living Lab Handbook for Cities is planned to be published next Summer 2014. The publication consists on pragmatic cases and methods, published both as a print version and as an online repository.

http://connectedsmartcities.eu/world-bank-enoll-strengthen-cooperation-on-open-innovation-the-living-lab-handbook-for-cities/