Policies on Innovation & Smart Cities

Oh no !!!! One more Smart City ranking !!!!!

Who didn’t think lately this when confronted with another Smart City ranking? Indeed, in the last years, in spite of the lack of indicators, it has been an explosion of smart city rankings attempting to bring something new to the table.

However, two main problems plague Smart City rankings.

First, the lack of data. There is little data at city level and therefore you have to resort to interviews, self-declared assessments or use national or at most regional data, which makes non-sense for individual cities. Also, there isn’t any data that could allow a fair comparison of city initiatives. Again surveys take the main role and with them a very subjective view, if not bias, of the impact and worth of these initiatives.

Secondly, the polyhedric nature of the concept. Smart City is usually defined by its impact in many areas ranging from resilience to citizen participation or economic growth. Having cities different priorities it seems logical that they push in different directions. How can you compare them? The classical example refers to new cities recently build versus the old ones where many infrastructures cannot be changed. They obviously confront very different priorities.

When in spite of these difficulties you attempt to produce an index, any index, comes the question of usefulness. What is its contribution? Rank the efforts that cities do around Smart Cities, why is this useful?

Most of them rank existing assets in the different categories of the index, which honestly adds little not only to our understanding but in terms of guiding political action.

Once you gave up comparing potatoes with oranges, resilience with citizen participation or the rise of the sharing economy, the idea of a ranking that can provide a framework that could orientate Smart City initiatives can certainly be of some interest.

Very recently (June 2015), Nesta, Accentrue and Catapult have produced one of these: Citie that aims to rank city initiatives for technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. Citie doesn’t cover the whole spectrum of Smart Cities but maybe its most interesting part because it talks about growth and these days we all need growth, don’t we?

I am sure that you want to know the winners first 🙂

These days apps4Europe (http://www.appsforeurope.eu) is ending. In the last 3 years apps4Europe tried to redefine the dynamic of hackathons making them more effective resulting in more and better apps putting into practice concepts such as the Business Lounge. This is the last of a series of European projects (Open Cities, Commons 4 Europe, CitySDK, apps4Europe, …) aimed at transforming cities into ecosystems where app services were provided not by the cities themselves but by developers and startups. It is therefore time for a reflection.

Over the past years European cities promoted lots of hackathons with the hope of fostering the development of city & civic apps. Hackathons have become a staple in cities’ policies with the ambition of promoting the development of a tech ecosystem.

However, very few startups graduated from this process and for the ones who did you can argue to what extend hackathons have been a decisive factor. Moreover, if we look at the apps that we have installed in our smartphones and we normally use, only very rarely we can find one resulting from this process. None is in the list of top 100 either.

Therefore, confronting results with the ambition it is hard to argue that we got far away with this strategy and it becomes pretty obvious that we have to rethink the whole process, because … it has not been working and it is not working. And in this case, it has not been that we didn’t try, we did and we did a lot.

In spite of this evidence however, cities continue investing in hackathons. It seems quite reasonable to ask us why is this happening and to what extent this is the best possible move.