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The principle goal of Complex Challenges, Innovative Cities (CCIC) project wa s to improve regional innovation policies by enhancing innovation in the public sector and increasing collaboration between local and regional authorities, public entities, and other stakeholders. Its key assumption wa s that public sector innovation is about new ideas that work towards creating of added public value. By exchanging good practices, project partners address ed a set of interlinked challenges faced by all public authorities and related to innovation in the public sector. Especially interesting to the project were topics such as: public finance for innovation; public authorities as innovators and innovation stimulators; public attitudes to innovation; public procurement to support innovations. At policy level CCIC contribute d by proposing recommendations to different levels of governance through focusing on the regional dimension of the EU, as defined by the Europe 2020 Strategy and the European Commission’s “Innovation Union” flagship initiative.
Project activities were distributed across 5 distinct phases, and targeted primarily local and regional authorities in 14 European cities, non-profit organizations, policy administrators and decision-makers, public officials and officers, and included :
- Identifying good practices – draft methodology on overall local/regional innovation performance; compil ation of a list of good practices by theme to be peer-reviewed by thematic groups; local public forums in each of the involved cities;
- Comprehensive analysis of best practices and elaboration of an analytical report on innovations in the public sector; database of good practices in public sector innovation and resulting effects;
- Study visits to investigate good practices and learn about local approaches to public sector innovation; identif ication of potential for knowledge transfer; publish ing of best practice guide;
- Selection of good practice for adopt ion; organiz ation of deep delegation program for policy-level exchange visits; report and recommendation for the adoption of innovations in the public sector.
The project was managed by a consortium of 14 partners from 10 EU member states, of which 8 we re local or regional authorities, three were non-profit organizations with expertise in innovation fostering and technology transfer. Sofia Municipality, Bulgaria, was the coordinating partner, with others including:
Applied Research and Communications Fund, Bulgaria;
Aberdeen City Council, United Kingdom;
Birmingham City Council, United Kingdom;
Municipality of Catania, Italy;
Harghita County Council, Romania;
City of Jyväskylä, Finland;
Local Development Agency of Sabadell SL, Spain;
Science Park Tartu, Estonia;
City of Warsaw, Poland;
Genoa Municipality, Italy;
Eindhoven Municipality, the Netherlands;
Lazio Region, Italy;
Gävle Municipality, Sweden.
The project was financed by INTERREG IVC, and lasted 36 months (January 2012 – December 2014).
Contacts:
Zoya Damianova, zoya.damianova(at)online(dot)bg
Ventseslav Kozarev, ventseslav.kozarev(at)online(dot)bg. |
