JPI Urban Europe has opened its Making Cities Work call for applicants. The call invites municipalities, businesses, researchers, civil society and other stakeholders to build transnational consortia to create challenge-driven innovation projects for European urban areas that have the potential to result in commercially successful services and products. Proposals should be submitted by 28 February 2018.
A substantial knowledge base has already been created within JPI Urban Europe research projects. Other national and international (incl. EU framework) research initiatives are also generating knowledge about the development of urban environments including both technological and socio-economic aspects.
However, much of this knowledge is not accessible to potential users and is not easily implemented. Implementation of new solutions can be hindered by institutional barriers (e.g. standards and regulations for construction, installations, procurement), social barriers (e.g. resistance of organisations and individuals to accept new ways of doing things) and financial barriers (business models to implement social innovations are unclear or not viable, or there are insufficient possibilities for scaling up innovations).
This call invites proposals for projects that tackle these barriers and address implementation issues. The projects will work on concrete urban challenges and focus on developing a proof of concept and learning on a European scale using transdisciplinary consortia with active participation of both municipalities and companies.
For the development of this call, cities and public utilities across Europe have contributed actively to develop a vision on which urban challenges are most pressing to address and for which challenges learning and developing on a European scale has a real added value. Through both national and international brokerage events with cities’ representatives, businesses, researchers and NGOs the topics in this call have been decided upon.
To ensure that projects supported by Making Cities Work have a lasting value, the participating city management must express its support and intention to develop follow-up of the project by implementation in a real-life situation. Cities can have different roles in innovation projects: they can be creators of regulations, which allow the innovation to move forward; they can be champions of new solutions and they can be the problem owners and solvers. Often, even forerunning innovative cities often test innovations in isolation. Sharing innovation experiences amongst European cities is the key to effectively tackle city innovation problems.
Source: JPI Urban Europe