OPEN INNOVATION CITIES Around the world, cities are working to jump-start an urban culture of open innovation. In the corporate economy, the concept of open innovation has been a response to the mandate for continuous economic growth. But over the next decade, cities will adopt the strategy to improve the quality of urban life as they cope with population growth, creating distinctive local ecosystems of social innovation and entrepreneurship alongside economic growth. In short, open innovation will emerge as a go-to strategy for urban development and redevelopment.

WHAT‘S DRIVING THIS FORECAST Environmental limits on old models of development through large infrastructure projects and large-scale industrial manufacturing Growing unemployment and underemployment, which are likely to worsen as automation reaches deeper into the workforce New commercial platforms, such as Uber and Instacart, that collect vast amounts of urban data of potential value to both cities and citizens The growing role that users of urban services play in designing and co-creating those very services

OPEN INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT Cities around the world adopt top-down policies to support open source software and hardware as part of a post-industrial development strategy SIGNAL: The city of Shenzhen is reinventing itself as an open manufacturing center with such initiatives as its Open Innovation Lab and Shenzhen Maker Week SO WHAT: Local manufacturing ecosystems develop distinctive innovation zones of advantage that rapidly propagate new products and processes through global digital supply webs Source image: http://www.szida.org/content-34-2115.html  

URBAN MATCHMAKING Source image: http://uxni.net/?p=6073 Cities create their own digital matchmaking platforms like Uber and AirBnB to support their local work economies and urban funding streams SIGNAL: Seoul recently banned Uber, developing their own similar platform, Kakao Taxi, in partnership with the popular app Kakao Talk and local taxi companies  Source image: http://uxni.net/?p=6073 SO WHAT: Cities tap into the data provided by their own open urban platforms to meet policy goals such as maintaining a viable workforce and public funding streams

CITY HALL AS API Cities increasingly organize themselves to share, manage, and facilitate the flows of data across both public and private operations SIGNAL: Barcelona 5.0 is an initiative to reorient city hall from managing PITO to facilitating DIDO—that is, from products in/trash out to data in/data out SO WHAT: Visionary cities conceive of the objects, people, and environments within their borders as nodes that can be better connected to increase social value and enhance self-sufficiency  Image source: http://cba.mit.edu/events/11.08.FAB7/Tomas.pdf

THE NEXT FIVE YEARS Cities increasingly partner with digital tech companies and local social inventors to kickstart solutions for a growing set of urban problems Cities create their own incubators for partnerships with innovators that emphasize equitable exchanges between the public and private sectors Urban leaders and social innovators develop crowdfunding strategies and platforms to support urban projects New legislation seeks to manage and mitigate risk in crowdfunded public projects

TEN-YEAR SCENARIO A decade from now, the open innovation cultures of individual cities are connected in city-to-city networks that drive rapid adoption of new models for sharing data, skills, and profits. City-to-city co-production initiatives compete with traditional corporate supply chains to share profits—and capacities— across national boundaries. In cities that have depended on mass manufacturing in the past decades, workforces are redeployed and reeducated for more agile production and service models that blend private and public platforms. Cities with their own microwork platforms have experienced a measurable drop in unemployment. A few cities are exploring the frontiers of distributed collaborative organizations and open innovation election platforms as a way out of systemic corruption.