'Doing things differently' seems to be on top of our agenda in dealing with the current environmental degradation, economic stagnation, and political gridlock. We have invested a great deal of our resources in accelerating the production and implementation of new and innovative ideas. Frameworks, models and tools are developed to harness opportunities created by social momentum and technological advances: design thinking, living labs, entrepreneurial municipality, and imagination infrastructuring, each promising not just novelty, but practical, actionable solutions.
We have invested a great deal of our resources into these innovation-seeking initiatives. Yet, recent studies suggest that while effective in solving immediate, tangible problems, these models often fail to address deeper, strategic challenges. A review of living labs across Europe reveals a persistent gap: the short-term solutions they generate rarely translate into long-term strategic decision-making for cities. There is little evidence that innovative solutions produced in living labs having impact on strategic decision making in cities.
The limits and challenges of our urban innovation management frameworks are often framed using political economy and institutional design lenses and are often focused on addressing practical concerns such as budget constraints, changing citizen needs, unequal resource distribution, and flawed communication channels. The challenges with urban innovation management are often viewed as unique to the complex phenomenon of cities and addressable through creation of better frameworks, tools and institutional designs.
But aligning innovation efforts with broader strategic goals is a challenge for almost everyone across all fields. It is not unique to urban planning. Mid-sized private companies, large scale public institutions and even individuals struggle to align their innovation efforts with their broader strategic goals. The mounting evidence suggests something deeper at play. without addressing the fundamental, often conceptual, problems in how we frame innovation, merely creating more tools, frameworks, and institutions will have limited impact.
SEMINAL sought to uncover these deeper challenges in innovation management models by examining their core building block, creativity; that is how one come up with new and useful ideas. Are the limitations of urban innovation models purely economic and institutional, or do they stem from something more fundamental, our very capacity to imagine and create for an uncertain, complex future?
