E-democracy through open innovation

Engineering Innovation In

Smart Government

                
                                                                            E-democracy through open innovation

Open innovation becomes the engine for a more innovative and increasingly democratic form of digital public administration.

Approach & Solution

Approach

Open innovation is one of the key paradigms underlying today’s global economy. It was first theorised by Henry Chesbrough in 2003 and is defined as follows: “The use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively.”

Solution

Engineering is a strong advocate of this approach and positions itself as an enabler of this paradigm by proposing an “idea management” solution aimed at the public sector.
The solution allows public administration professionals to:

Propose new ideas in a collaborative way and identify potential solutions to problems.
Manage all the phases of the innovation cycle in an optimised way, including: (a) idea generation; (b) evaluation and selection; (c) refinement of the idea; (d) implementation; and (e) monitoring.
Enable their users to leave feedback and comments on ideas so as to contribute to the implementation of solutions.

Results

Our solution, Open Innovation Area (OIA), is having a significant impact on major territorial innovation processes in Italy and beyond.
It is ongoing European project, WeLive, in which Open Innovation Area is being used to support regional innovation for the Trento, Bilbao, Novi Sad areas and the Helsinki-Uusimaa region.
It has also been used, for example, in the municipality of Lecce’s “Capital of Culture 2019” initiative. In this particular case, 500 participants were involved in the OIA process, which generated 2,013 ideas.

The value added by the solution includes:
- Revealing to public administration professionals the actual needs of their territory.
- Bringing transparency to the process of selecting the best ideas based on clear requirements and criteria and also by publishing the final results.

Project Value

Innovation

Our Products & Other Technologies

OIA - Open Innovation Area

Project Team

Research & Innovation

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