Entrepreneurs in the City

By Molly Webb, Head of Smart Technologies, The Climate Group.

November 25, 2011 

Yesterday at the Eindhoven Summit on Service Innovation in Cities run by Living Labs Global (our partner for the Living Labs Global Award), I was again reminded of just how wide the definition of ‘smart cities’ is.

The group of 170 entrepreneurs, city governments, academics and other innovation support organizations (such as Ashoka and Fordcastle) were interested in everything from smart homes to remote medical solutions to lighting control platforms to locking mechanisms for bike schemes.

What is clear is that deploying smart solutions in cities takes good governance, the ability for city employees to work across departments, and a recognition by city officials that one service might have multiple benefits.

As Karen Lee from New York noted, there is huge overlap between her work in health and obesity with environmental issues. Our modern afflictions such as heart disease are what she called ‘diseases of energy’ where we’re able to do things like drive instead of walk – if we got people out on their bikes, we’d use less transport fuel and help people get healthier. So, they’ve developed some design guidelines to help with just these kinds of shifts in behavior, and from simple things like signs to remind people to walk up stairs, they are seeing 50% more people try the stairs. 

So, my favourite session at the Summit: I had a chance to run a visioning working on how we could Empower the ‘prosumer’ (or producer of energy) of the future, with participants from Eindhoven city, Oracle, marketing specialists and entrepreneurs. The group came up with an online service for supporting prosumers in finding others who are generating power, finding ways to compare and compete, and ideally grouping together for bulk buying of generation opportunities. 

Our report entitled Information Marketplaces: The New Economics of Cities tackles some of these kinds of solutions and more.