New paper: Understanding Civic Crowdfunding as a Mechanism for Leveraging Civic Engagement and Urban Innovation

Posted at 8 July 2020 in Innovation, Intelligent Cities / Smart Cities, Platforms, Apps, Solutions

This paper analyses the dynamics of government initiated civic crowdfunding platforms, with regards to participation inequalities and their defining dimensions. Such platforms are considered by the authors as governmental responses for bottom-up peer-to-peer support mechanisms related to urban innovation, which also allows top-down governance and governmental support systems for civic entrepreneurship.

Sharing cities and citizens sharing: Perceptions and practices in Milan

Posted at 12 May 2020 in Business Models, Innovation, Platforms, Apps, Solutions

Sharing has become a global phenomenon; business models, social innovations and technological developments enable an escalated number of uses for a given asset, resulting in reshaped urban dynamics, practices and morphologies.

This paper is exploring diverse aspects of sharing economy as part of the urban fabric, through participatory activities with citizens and stakeholders. It investigates the co-construction of society and technology with respect to the implementation of sharing-based strategies in urban practices.

Transforming innovation for decarbonisation? Insights from combining complex systems and social practice perspectives

Posted at 8 May 2020 in Collaborative Innovation, Innovation, Innovation Strategies

The transformation of research and policy approaches to innovation for decarbonisation towards a type of social innovation, is promising to open discussions and interrelate with the present reality. This paper starts by challenging the demand-supply dichotomy. Complex systems and social practice theories represent the compelling frameworks whereby to deal with this transformation.

Digital research and innovation: why do platforms prevail?

Posted at 26 April 2020 in Innovation, Innovation ecosystems

In recent days we have seen a series of initiatives to combat the pandemic with data, web platforms for research sharing, and models for simulation and forecasting. But how successful can these efforts be? What digital systems can strengthen and accelerate research and innovation in various fields of science and technology?

Rules, collective and human intelligence: Balance in mission-driven research

Posted at 26 April 2020 in Collective Intelligence, Innovation

Unprecedented circumstances with Covid-19 make the need for mission-driven research to be more urgent, mobilizing research labs to discover drugs and vaccines, squeezing the usual timeline for such discoveries and bypassing standard operating rules. But what is the balance between mission rules and human ingenuity?

Energy Communities An overview of energy and social innovation

Posted at 3 March 2020 in Collaborative Innovation, Innovation

This report is providing an overview of the activities, organisation and implications of energy communities as participants across the energy system. It identifies them as contiguous processes of both the energy transition and social innovation. Paths for future policy implications and research initiatives are analysed and informed. The European Commission’s Clean Energy for All Europeans Package is stated as the indicator of the role prosumers and their collective forms will play in the future energy system.

Like Smart Cities, Smart Farms pose their own challenges

Posted at 17 April 2019 in Innovation

In several countries, such as Canada, a digital revolution like the one that created smart cities, is affecting farms. Technology is starting to transform farms and farming. Not only the vast, industrial-scale factory farms, but also small and organic farms. As in the case of smart cities, this technology provides significant benefits, but also creates significant challenges.