The Effective Model for Smart City Innovation: Tech4Muni
When we first started working with municipalities almost three years ago, one thing was very clear to us: the public sector is not different than the private sector, and we would like to create a model for municipal innovation that would both bring immediate value to the cities (“quick wins”) and at the same time increase their innovative capacity in the long term and teach them about the benefits and best practices of Smart City Innovation. This is how Tech4Muni model came to existence: a swift and effective program to bring technology to municipalities.
The objective of the program is to teach a systematic innovation implementation process, with a bold approach to choosing relevant challenges, educating teams inside the municipality to lead such projects on their own, to create collaboration between startups and municipalities and ensure quick and long-term wins. The concept for Tech4Muni program is based on the understanding that municipalities are eager to implement innovation and go through a smart digital transformation process but are still inexperienced in their innovation activities, working with startups and implementing technologies.
The Tech4Muni program has already influenced the lives of residents in over 30 municipalities in Israel and Europe. Currently, it is implemented in Germany as well under the name CityTech. The Tech4Muni is a four to six-month long program for municipalities who wish to find solutions to their specified challenges. During the program, the innovation leaders inside the municipalities learn how to create challenges, validate them and find relevant solutions. On top of that, municipalities learn how to work with tech startups in a confident and knowledgeable way. The last stage of the program is a pilot with the relevant technologies and implementing the solutions on a larger scale following a successful POC (proof-of-concept).
TECH4MUNI Program Stages:
Step 1: Challenge Creation
Municipalities around the world are eager to innovate, but often they do not know where to start. At CREATORS, we believe that defining a significant challenge(s) with the municipality’s innovation team is the key to early-stage success. This is why this step is the first part of the program, created as a series of workshops starting from scratch and finishing with a very clear challenge definition. The challenges should reflect a major problem of the municipality’s residents or employees. Some challenges in our former programs included targeted communication with residents, waste management or transportation issues, or tech-driven tourism promotion.
Step 2: Challenge Validation
Managing a quick but effective validation process is the key part of Tech4Muni. The validation process reveals bottlenecks and central issues that create and affect the challenge, but it also helps to understand the challenge from the perspective of all its stakeholders, often revealing issues that the municipality innovators were not aware of. For example, in some cases the municipality representatives learn that some solutions they think are important are not necessary, or even rejected by the residents.
Step 3: Mapping the Existing Technologies in the Market | Application Process
Searching for technologies that can solve the validated challenges is an important step when discovering relevant solutions in various sectors, not necessarily related to Smart Cities or GovTech. The mapped solutions may belong to both startups and established enterprises if relevant, including e.g. startups with ready products or big municipal / global software providers which operate today in the private sector. At the same time, the challenges are exposed to the market and this leads to even better coverage of ALL potential solutions — not only in the Smart City or GovTech sectors. This happens because if you are presented with a detailed brief about the specific challenge, the variety of solutions and their accuracy increases. Cases of “discovered” solutions that could answer the challenge in a surprising way happened in all of our programs so far.
Step 4: Creating a High-Visibility Event
The event’s goal is to enable both sides — municipalities and startups — to meet and explore opportunities for collaboration. The event may look differently depending on the specific challenges or the ecosystem maturity. For instance, in our Tech4Muni event in North Macedonia with the United Nations Development Program, 16 companies (out of over 40 applicants) were accepted to the 2-day hackathon event, where they met municipalities interested in implementing their solutions alongside experienced mentors. The event hosted over 70 formal meetings and many more, informal ones!
These meetings are not merely introductions to the challenge and the solution, but very concrete discussions about the risks and potential wins, the infrastructural technicalities and next steps. This is because both sides got to know each other well prior to the meeting and CHOSE to be connected.
Step 5 and 6: Choosing the Most Relevant Solution and Creating a Pilot
Once the municipalities go through the challenge creation, validation and meetings processes, they usually know very well which solutions are relevant for them. After they make their decision, we move on to creating a pilot implementation process with specified milestones and KPIs. We assist municipalities in building the project framework to have a fast implementation program. Implementing the solution, monitoring the pilot, analyzing the results and deciding on the next steps are supported by CREATORS team in order to assure that we brought the right value to our partners.
Why Tech4Muni?
Tech4Muni is a comprehensive program concept that supports municipalities in learning to create challenges, validating them, finding relevant solutions, and implementing the best ones in a quick POC model. On top of that, municipalities learn how to work with tech startups in a confident and knowledgeable way. This unique approach helps to solve cities’ significant challenges by building collaborations between various cities and advanced startups, and teaching municipalities’ officials to systematically inject innovation into their organizations.
We believe that working together on a similar challenge develops a quick and smart implementation process based on the shared knowledge and teamwork. With over 30 municipalities we have worked with so far, we have seen a tremendous change in the way the city innovators go through and become more eager to innovate. There is no doubt that Smart City is not a slogan any more. The question is when, and not if, your city becomes a Smart City.
