Urban Living Birmingham John R. Bryson FAcSS Director City-Region Economic Development Institute, Professor of Enterprise and Competitiveness E-mail: J.R.Bryson@bham.ac.uk
Overall Aim of the RCUK Urban Living Partnership The Urban Living Partnership will promote the development of integrated approaches to address the challenges faced by urban areas in the UK and to help them realise their visions for future urban living. The aim is to accelerate the exploitation of leading-edge research knowledge and capabilities, create new products, services and business opportunities and co-produce sustainable change in urban living to benefit cities and their communities.
The Urban Living Partnership brings together the seven Research Council and Innovate UK to form a partnership to advance: (i) Inter-disciplinary and cross-sectoral collaboration, (ii) The development of integrated approaches to address the challenges faced by urban areas in the UK (iii) These research consortia must bring together cross-disciplinary research expertise, city leaders, civic organisations and community groups, public, third sector, private sector businesses and other urban innovators. (iv) The focus of a bid may a specific UK city/urban area but the pilots must develop a more holistic understanding of the complex and interdependent challenges faced by the place that can be translated elsewhere. This is all about diagnose.
The Urban Living Birmingham Project
Innovation as a Process: Transforming Services End-user innovation Open Innovation
The Urban Living Birmingham Research Process: 1) DIAGNOSE: Work with a wide consortium to identify challenges facing the city and to explore the development of solutions. What are the key challenges and also opportunities to develop new solutions that will produce better outcomes for people? 2) Five service areas: to explore end-user and open innovations that might lead to alternative solutions that would improve quality, access and integration. Exemplar challenge areas: 1. Powering the City 2. Resourcing the City and Citizens 3. Transport and connectivity 4. Connecting the City and Citizen 5. Empowering Citizens 3) Identify solutions.
Urban Living Birmingham Conceptual Principles Cross-cutting conceptual principles used in the development of this proposal: These are: 1. From citizen to co-creator or co-innovator of urban services. The discussion explored existing approaches, which placed citizens in the role of receiver of services rather than co-creator, and how this should be transformed. 2. From City Councillor to facilitator. The Kerslake review noted that Birmingham City Council had often swept deep and the City Council would be transformed from a top-down provider of services to citizens to a facilitator of service provision. 3. A focus on understanding integrated city systems and developing a holistic approach to Birmingham s challenges. 4. A focus on enhanced living environments, quality of life and opportunity, and hence better outcomes for people.
Our hypothesis is that optimising the individual components and systems of the city can only be achieved by a holistic citizen-led approach to innovation: (i) Applying a whole person or whole family approach to understanding the demand and consumption of urban services, based on data, to ensure that all participants share a common understanding; (ii) Identifying integrated and city-wide innovations to transform the city s (economic, social and/or environmental) systems to produce better outcomes for people, in particular by the application of end-user and open innovation to urban services (iii) Identifying experiments in partnership with Birmingham City Council and others.
Work package 1: Holistic Diagnosis of Challenges and Co- Creation of Impact. Innovation Stations. Work Package 2: End-user and Open Innovation and Public Services Work Package 3: Critical Challenge Areas: Listening and Learning Work Package 4: Diagnosing Innovation Opportunities
Start date: 1 June 2016 18 Months