An innovation process for a town/city
From an article by Apolitical
Towns and cities today must respond effectively to the needs of increased urbanisation. To do this, they need to learn and embrace an innovation process in their practices.
In contrast to their conservative practices, municipalities will likely need more of an appetite for risk and foster a culture of embracing change. Empowering the public sector with a suitably-designed innovation process is essential.
Chiang Mai City Lab is an example of a collaborative platform allowing the municipality to embark on an innovation journey with crucial stakeholders. Local government and diverse stakeholders come to learn, collaborate and exercise new ways of dealing with the city’s future challenges.
Thailand is transforming from a predominantly rural country into an urban one. As more and more Thais are now living in urban areas, many cities across the country are encountering several challenges in urban development, such as an overcrowded population, insufficient utilities, underdeveloped facilities, social problems, environmental issues and a disparity between urban and rural areas. This places enormous pressure on municipalities in many developing urban areas regarding public service delivery and demands municipalities to respond effectively to these dynamic urbanisation needs.
Chiang Mai City Municipality is a city-level municipality with a population of 122,000 and a popular tourist destination accommodating many visitors. However, the municipality faces several of the urbanisation-related challenges above.
The innovation journey encourages the municipality to embrace curiosity, adopt an experimental mindset, understand societal transformations, and take necessary steps to drive positive changes.
While private sector innovation focuses on gaining a competitive advantage and profits, public sector innovation aims to address societal and economic challenges, enhance public value and improve service delivery. However, many public sector organisations will likely need more risk appetite due to their mindfulness of how to spend public funds and a deeply ingrained culture that impedes them from embracing change. To overcome this critical challenge, empowering public sector offices with a suitably-designed innovation process is essential.
An innovation process allows them to proactively pursue ground-breaking ideas, feel encouraged to break from conservative approaches and share a sense of ownership.
Chiang Mai City Lab has a 4-stage innovation process:
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A series of participatory processes - e.g. an interactive exhibition, online brainstorming and interactive art gallery took place to explore the hopes and fears of Chiang Mai’s citizens regarding the challenges and transformations of the city.
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The voices of Chiang Mai’s citizens and the scanned drivers of change are developed into the scenarios of preferred futures. These are then used as a shared vision for developing transformative strategies.
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Innovation development initiatives and actions are rolled out to provide passionate ‘dreamers and doers’, e.g. active citizens, local governments, service providers and tech companies co-creating opportunities and resource support.
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Innovative ideas and solutions are tested and piloted in a sandbox to explore the transformative impact, gain acknowledgment and learn how to upscale.
Chiang Mai City Lab also offers a variety of resources and support to help innovators bring their ideas to life, including a series of events on innovation challenges, a co-working space to work, collaborate, and network, training and mentorship programmes for skills and knowledge development, and resource access such as funding, data and experts.
As a result, since the platform started in 2021, more than 15 innovative solutions have been developed, prototyped and piloted in the Chiang Mai municipal area. For example, the household remedy dispensing machine, known as ‘Tuu Pun Ya’ , is a solution developed through this deliberative process. The solution aims to solve the inequality issue of people experiencing homelessness and their access to basic health needs. The issue was one of the top listed issues revealed and identified by the process above and was co-created between the municipality, selective technology companies and a group of active citizens.
Read the full article here.
How innovative is Local Government? The process above speeds up necessary innovation, meets local needs and involves local people and this must surely lead to better solutions, involvement and a real sense of community.
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From an article by Apolitical, 18/06/2024