ARC Fund team took part in the third consortium meeting of the Complex Challenges – Innovative Cities project, held in Gävle, Sweden between October 2-4, 2012. The focal point of discussions during those few days was the identification of good innovation practices among local and regional authorities in Europe. Partners presented a number of interesting measures and projects done locally in order to demonstrate the ability of the public sector to generate positive societal momentum through the introduction of new programmes, methods and services.
ARC Fund’s key responsibility in CCIC is to design the methodological framework for partners to use for the exploration of innovation potential in the public sector. As such, our role includes the preparation of a number of instruments that partners can use to scope through their local environment and identify practices, stakeholders and opinions about the opportunities and hurdles of public sector innovation. To that end, ARC Fund’s team delivered two separate presentations detailing the progress within CCIC’s analytical tools framework. The first presentation, delivered by Zoya Damianova, provided an overview of the round of semi-structured stakeholder interviews carried out by each partner, revealing many common trends in perceiving public sector innovation across countries, as well as a number of interesting local innovation practices and approaches. This was followed by a presentation from Ventseslav Kozarev, who demonstrated interim results from the online state-of-the-art questionnaire of public sector innovation (available until November 15th at http://vrsurveys.com/index.php?sid=35343).
The second day included discussions specifically on practices based on financial instruments underlying cross-sectoral collaborations, and inspiring new policy developments based on innovative asset management by public sector bodies. Thematic discussions revolved around a sequence of partners’ presentations on local good practices involving both creative approaches to available EU financial schemes, and exclusively local/regional solutions based on original cooperation mechanisms between the public and the private sector.
Prior to the event’s formal adjourn, partners had the opportunity to visit the Gävle Technology Park, focusing on the development and application of GIS technologies to the enhancement of traditional public services such as health care or disaster preparedness.
The CCIC project brings together partners – mostly municipal and regional authorities – from 10 EU countries, and aims at stimulating the leading role of municipal and regional authorities in supporting and generating innovation in the public sector. It was made possible by the INTERREG IV Programme and is cofinanced by the European Regional Development Fund.
