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113366IINNNNOOVVAATTIIOONN:: MMAANNAAGGEEMMEENNTT,, PPOOLLIICCYY&& PPRRAACCTTIICCEEVolume 10, Issue 2–3, October–December 2008
Cities matter. By 2006, more than half of the
total OECD population lived in urban
areas. Major cities in OECD countries generate
almost one third of their nations’ production
while in some countries more than half national
output is produced by one city and some Cana-
dian cities generate half or more of their
provinces’ value added (OECD 2006: 13). Cities
are a nation’s innovation hubs, producing almost
all patents and other measures of new products
and processes in business.
Cities also matter increasingly because they
are hotspots of consumption and hence waste
generation and already responsible for 75% of
global energy consumption and 80% of green-
house gas emissions. Moreover, while cities in
most rich developed countries are the motors of
economic growth and the development and
maintenance of the population’s living standards,
they are also generators of major social problems,
social inequalities and economic disadvantage.
Cities are complex entities and play multiple
and complex economic and social roles. Govern-
ments are only now coming to grips with issues
about how to best deal with the problems while
also encouraging the generators of their wealth.
Doing so makes enormous new demands on gov-
ernance mechanisms and the skills of politicians
and administrators as well as the imaginations
and willingness of city populations to finance
and accommodate change.
Over recent decades, as several papers in this
volume make clear, the economic literature on
contemporary development has focused increasing-
ly on innovation as the key to the long term com-
petitiveness of modern western nations and drawn
attention to the role of technological change as an
endogenous factor in growth and the shift of tech-
no-economic paradigm which causes nations and
their component firms to move to new products,
processes and organisational forms in all areas of
production – resources, manufacturing and servic-
es. The emerging international economy among
western countries has become known as the
‘knowledge economy’, increasingly reliant on the
generation and use of knowledge, formal and
informal, as a major factor of production. Institu-
tional and knowledge-generating arrangements
brought together in national systems of innovation
underpin this shift (see eg Edquist 1997), even
though much of the shift to the new economy has
been linked to shifts in international production
systems, known collectively as globalisation.
Attention has been drawn to the bases of the
innovation necessary for competitiveness. The out-
standing factor is usually agreed to be knowledge.
While all production has always involved often
quite important inputs of knowledge, there now
seems to be agreement that modern economic sys-
tems are based on formal knowledge to a much
higher degree than older ones. This knowledge can
be scientific or linked more closely to information
Copyright © eContent Management Pty Ltd. Innovation: management, policy & practice (2008) 10: 136–145.
INTRODUCTION
Innovation in the city and innovative cities
JJAANNEEMMAARRCCEEAAUU
Visiting Professor, City Futures Research Centre, University of New South Wales,
Sydney NSW, Australia
about customer needs, overseas markets or new
organisational possibilities, often themselves made
possible by radical new technologies and their
application as platforms for a wide variety of
industrial and service sector uses. Both formal and
informal knowledge are carried by people as they
work and move around different spatial arenas. So
knowledge, its generation and diffusion, visible as
innovations, have come to the heart of policies for
modern economic development.
Innovations are made by people operating in
organisations and firms but it has become clear
that much of the impetus for innovation comes
from the socio-economic and technical systems in
which any firm or organisation operates and
innovates. These systems are composed of institu-
tions, both in the sense of organisations and the
regulatory ‘rules of the game’, legal arrangements,
especially for intellectual property and labour
markets, education and training provision, finan-
cial and other support organisations and gover-
nance via formal governments and the more
informal partnerships that provide input to the
formal regulation and political systems. It is at the
level of systems of innovation that national
arrangements are the most evidently important. It
is usually national governments that mandate
financial and other regulation, organise education
systems, make labour and intellectual property
laws, provide welfare and other social inclusion or
income redistribution policies, govern the tax sys-
tem and make critical trade and other treaties
that form a national system of innovation (NIS).
More recently, over perhaps the last decade and
a half, observers have come to realise that nations
may not always be the relevant territorial unit of
analysis when examining the motors of economic
growth. On the one hand, this view has resulted
from the obvious international and globalising
waves that have shifted the world’s territorial pro-
duction and consumption patterns and multiplied
international connections, making transnational
regions important in some areas. Innovation sys-
tems can be much larger than national systems
and in some contexts it may make good sense to
speak of an area with similar rules such as the EU
or close trade links such as the Asia Pacific zone as
a region. On the other hand, closer investigation
has also shown the divergences within national
boundaries as to how territorial units grow richer
or poorer and more or less diverse.
It has thus become increasingly clear that sub-
national levels of territorial unit are also important
and have their own organisational and institution-
al arrangements. One level of these has been
described collectively as ‘regional systems of inno-
vation’ (RIS) (see eg Cooke 2007 for a summary
of recent theorising). The term ‘region’ of course
may cover areas hugely diverse in size, whether of
territory and/or of population, and may even cross
international borders as in several zones in Europe,
such as Oresund which covers areas of both Den-
mark and Sweden. Regional systems seem often
conceived of as smaller versions of national sys-
tems, subject on the one hand to national rules of
the game but also with regional variations in terms
of population, research and training systems or
facilities, production structures and specialisations
and such matters as income levels, which may
determine consumption levels, and languages or
cultural practices. Regions may also be conflated
with Provinces or States in federal systems of gov-
ernment as these levels of government determine
many of the specific rules and practices relating to
innovation, such as education and research sys-
tems, transport and other access arrangements and
financial or regulatory support for innovative
activities. It is often these levels of government
that have the closest interest in the mechanisms
and location of specific kinds of economic activity.
In developed countries, however, regions are
usually dominated by one or more major cities and
it is cities that are the real heart of most regional
innovation systems. Cities, moreover, it is increas-
ingly clear, have their own, more local, systems of
innovation, composed of the same elements as
higher order systems but geographically much
more concentrated even though they necessarily
have many of their economic relationships (firms’
clients and suppliers) with areas beyond the imme-
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diate city borders. Cities, especially large cities, are
where it all happens in terms of economic develop-
ment and innovation, knowledge generation and
diffusion, the availability of skilled personnel,
important transport nodes and the housing of both
people and firms. It is where much local planning
takes place, especially in terms of investment in
new or replacement elements of the built environ-
ment, special incubator zones or science parks and
many of the other supply-side elements that are
generally agreed to be important to innovation by
companies and public institutions. It is in cities
that the firms who generate economic activity and
the public authorities that organise governance are
most likely to interact on a regular basis and where
information related to all aspects of innovation
more freely occurs. It is in cities that, for example,
innovative partnerships between government, busi-
ness and communities may be easiest to arrange
since the organisations concerned are smaller than
at national levels and in principle at least more per-
meable than higher levels of government, leading
to faster problem-solving and greater room for pol-
icy experimentation.
Cities house innovative firms and innovative
people. But not all cities are innovative power
houses and not all are innovative in the same way
or to a similar degree across national geographical
areas. Some cities at some times are ‘in decline’
while others are growing in both population and
economic terms so fast that infrastructure provision
and other innovation-related organisations and
services may not be able to keep up. In between are
cities where innovation is accepted as a desirable
goal but where for various reasons it is not leading
the city’s development. In yet other cases, the pub-
lic authority side of the city may be miles ahead of
business development while in others innovation is
pushed by companies powering ahead.
Cities also come in a vast range of sizes and com-
positions and are located in very different national
and international contexts and circumstances. It is
very often difficult to see the boundaries of a city
since they have nothing that really resembles a fron-
tier. Work on cities as local innovation systems has
mostly focused on larger metropolitan areas which
are often called city-regions as their economic foot-
print extends well beyond the main built up area. It
seems most useful to define a city ‘in policy terms at
least’ as the area of the economic footprint. Thus, in
Australia, Sydney, the country’s largest city, is often
referred to by policymakers as the Greater Sydney
Region or the Sydney Basin and may be stretched
as far as Newcastle to the north and Wollongong to
the south if it is to match the functional economy.
*******************
This special issue of IMPP (ISBN 978-1-
921348-17-4) is called Innovation in the City and
Innovative Cities. The first section of the volume
is devoted to papers that describe and analyse
issues relating to what makes some cities grow and
others stagnate or even decline and the reasons
behind different patterns of development over
time and space. These papers address major puz-
zles about the drivers of city development and the
associated economic innovation and set the
groundwork for discussing the potential roles that
city managers and policymakers can play in
encouraging ‘laggard’ cities, regenerating older and
less economically robust cities and maintaining
and further supporting growing urban areas.
Much of the discussion is about economic devel-
opment as most observers of city dynamics have
had an economic focus, much as national and sub-
national policymakers everywhere have done. In
Europe interest in cities and the innovation that
takes place within them has been supported and
sometimes led by European Union policymakers
and leaders who deal directly with cities, firms and
government organisations in Member countries.
Economic success has also brought new con-
cerns about cities, most notably their environmen-
tal sustainability, since most ecological damage is
caused by city populations, especially the wealthier
ones. Dealing with these major issues brings new
needs to the fore and demands both innovative
social and governance partnerships and technolog-
ical solutions, new ways of doing things, new
transport solutions, new pricing mechanisms, new
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ways of raising and spending resources and poten-
tially new governance structures for many cities.
Technologies play an ambiguous role – some, such
as cars, may be part of the problem but others can
be part of the solution, providing that the human
side of the equation is flexible and prepared to
think and act in new ways. Social innovation is
becoming increasingly important.
This volume mostly refers to cities in developed
western countries, essentially because there are
already so many issues that it seemed wise to limit
description and discussion to countries that share
many common elements in economy, society and
government. The volume is designed to demon-
strate to readers that there are many explanations
of what makes a city work and grow or do less well
and analysts take different slants as well as present
some important examples of city innovations. The
particular elements in the city or cities of interest
to any given reader will always be slightly different
but the intention is to provide policymakers with
examples that work (or do not), to persuade ana-
lysts that each city needs to be treated in its own
terms but that the many common elements should
also be recognised as part of the equation and to
provide tools and frameworks for their analysis and
for further research in particular cases. It is intrigu-
ing that there is yet so little agreement on the rea-
sons behind different city trajectories, whether
successful or not, and the role that policy can play
in change. Authors were asked to provide readers
with real world examples. The examples selected
are drawn mostly from much of Europe, the US,
Canada and Australia but also Korea and China.
The next sections of this Introduction present
an overview of the foci of the papers gathered in
this volume. Each writer was asked to tie their
argument as closely as possible to specific examples
and to focus on particular issues. These have exem-
plified different frameworks and approaches as well
as very differing emphases. Behind most of them,
however, lies a view that Schumpeterian economic
theories about technological development and
especially the ‘creative destruction’ resulting from
the entrepreneurial use of new technical possibili-
ties are the most valuable way into analysing and
describing much of what happens in cities today.
Taking this approach, different writers have
emphasised different elements. Some have empha-
sised the role of the public sector, especially as it
deals with the multiple problems and turbulence
associated with what Johnson calls ‘urban order’,
while others look more at the entrepreneurship
which is critical to city economic growth. Some
examine innovation in cities from the supply side,
of what cities and their public authorities offer and
where competitiveness is often about attracting
innovative firms and actors from other areas. Oth-
ers focus on what cities do or can do to change
growth trajectories by internal mechanisms.
The first section of the volume brings out the
importance of city characteristics, notably size and
diversity [Wolfe & Bramwell (2008) addresses this
issue] since innovation comes from interactions
between populations diverse both in people and
firms and diversity suggest size. Diverse people
bring a range of skills and diverse firms find new
talent and bigger and differing markets. Johnson
(2008), for example, brings these issues out as part
of his discussion of local city systems of innovation.
Moreover, since it is clear that not all city growth is
smooth the dynamics of innovation vary over time
and space, Johnson points importantly to the role
of maintaining what he calls ‘public order’ in cities
in response to the problems that cities create. The
sheer number of people gathered in a relatively
small space and their many needs create situations
where governments need to act. By doing so, they
create markets for new products and services –
health and hygiene, law and order, transport, edu-
cation and so on. Crises, Johnson (2008) says, also
give cities a push to find innovative solutions and
allow them to take risks unacceptable at other
times. Other contributors take up the theme of cri-
sis and risk when discussing why not all cities inno-
vate and how cities can escape the path dependence
which otherwise dominates their development tra-
jectories as Martin and Simmie (2008) show in
their contribution to section one. These characteris-
tics are not simple, however, and a recent paper by
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Storper and Manville (2006) has pointed usefully
to the need to specify much more clearly exactly
what is meant by factors such as diversity and cre-
ativity and the need to study urban choices in more
depth if policymakers are to make the right choices.
How these different aspects of city life work
together and especially how policymakers can
influence them is a common theme in the special
issue. In the first section, Athey and his colleagues
(2008) suggest that innovation is carried out by
firms which in turn depend on different aspects of
the operations of city life. Cities provide both the
urbanisation economies in scale and scope and the
underlying complementary assets that firms need
for innovation. Cities seem to roughly divide
between those in which local hubs are critical to
innovative firms and those where companies
depend more on local interactions and networks.
City managers, Athey and colleagues suggest
(2008), need to recognise these differences in what
their local industries need and invest in comple-
mentary assets accordingly. Implicit in this view is
that policymakers must be able to analyse and
make sophisticated judgements about the needs of
the different business sectors in their jurisdictions.
This ability is seldom encouraged by national level
industry development strategies which in most
OECD countries focus rather on general under-
pinning conditions except in the case of new sci-
ence-based industries, especially biotechnology
(Marceau & Wixted 2003).
The second section of the special issue discusses
innovation in cities in the different realms of oper-
ation of major cities. Most cities, of course, link
both innovations in city policies and investments
and economic growth through entrepreneurship
with innovations in organisational arrangements
for administration and policy decisions as well as
their implementation. In many cases, the one may
not be possible without the other if the upward
virtuous economic circle is to be enhanced and
maintained. Cities are still experimenting and
coming to grips with the manifold and urgent
issues that face them, especially sustainability.
Some of the issues are transport options, some
proper pricing of infrastructure and services so that
real costs become transparent, some concern lower-
ing emissions and saving limited resources such as
water and energy, some concern combating the
social inequalities that have tended to accompany
economic growth, some with regenerating old
areas and inadequate housing. The particular con-
figurations of common issues are innumerable.
This means that every city has to learn major les-
sons itself and to do so must inevitably improve its
information gathering and scanning systems and
learn from the experiences of others. But it must
do so in a sophisticated manner and not assume
that what works in Stockholm or Amsterdam will
work in Melbourne or Singapore, let alone in the
huge cities of China or Korea.
There are, however, some lessons that can be
learned from the experience of others. In this
small volume it has not been possible to cover all
aspects of what innovative cities must manage. We
have picked some of the most important which
show what cities can usefully do – or indeed not
do. The first paper in this section, by van Winden
(2008), focuses on the immense challenges of gov-
ernance of cities which are actively trying to max-
imise levels of innovation among local firms and
industries but also innovate in housing and infra-
structure development. Developed cities cannot
let up – they have to keep up the momentum
already achieved. The OECD in its 2006 overview
of the dilemmas faced by major cities emphasised
those relating to governance (by public and other
sector players) and government. Van Winden
(2008) discusses the issues of how to relate the
disparate agendas of national, regional (State or
Province) and city governments to each other’s
needs and constraints as they struggle to link
appropriately broad civil society goals and political
platforms, such as social inclusion, with the need
to invest in the engines of innovation and growth
that underpin the prosperity of the nation and
which mostly happen in cities.
The issues they must deal with cover not only
how to develop priorities for activities close to
market or community policies but also who has
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to deal with the less desirable consequences, the
levels of government that should be responsible
for the infrastructure that modern city competi-
tiveness requires but which may be too costly for
city residents to finance, and over when and how
to develop the public–private partnerships that
may be needed to resolve funding and regulation
issues and ensure that the broad interests of the
public are maintained. Governance issues include
taxation and other mechanisms of urban finance
but decisions about these cannot be fixed exclu-
sively at one level of government. This issue is
only indirectly addressed in this volume for rea-
sons of space but American cities such as San
Francisco offer interesting examples of different
modes of urban finance packaging to address
areas such as low and mixed income housing.
Coordination of policies is also of vital impor-
tance to innovation in the city and to innovative
cities as they seek to address broader issues. The
OECD overview in 2006 focused especially on
issues of coordination and it is clear from contri-
butions to this volume that packages of policies,
not single focus interventions, are essential to
successful urban growth and innovation. The
complexity of cities and the crowded policy space
in which all must operate make it almost impos-
sible to address one issue at a time. Van Winden
(2008) thus focuses on vertical, horizontal and
sectoral planning coordination and the trade-offs
that need to be made. Organising capability is
essential. As Bradford (2005) has suggested, what
is needed are place policies and as Cooke (2007:
133) has also emphasised, platforms of policies are
essential to strengthening milieu and entrepre-
neurship structure, embedding and connectivity.
In the second section, one paper by a British–
Australian collaboration (Couchman, McLoughlin
& Charles, 2008) indicates how much attention is
paid by policymakers to the creation of special
‘places’ which are assumed to be the basis of eco-
nomic development along trajectories quite differ-
ent from their current ones. Using contrasting
cities, Newcastle in the UK, an old mining city
(‘old and cold’ in Storper’s phrase), and the Gold
Coast in Australia, a new retirement and tourism
area (‘sun and sprawl’), the authors show how dif-
ferent levels of government now provide, some-
times ill-assorted, incentives for place development.
In Newcastle’s case, the UK government decided
on the need for a ‘science city’ to regenerate the
industrial base whereas in the case of the Gold
Coast the assumption was that creating a new place
would reduce the ‘retirement’ image of the popula-
tion and encourage science-based firms to locate
there as part of the broader ‘Smart State’ strategy of
the Queensland government. This new Pacific
Innovation Corridor in practice seems to have been
largely a real estate, supply-side development. The
local authority seems to have had neither the
resources (six people in its development division)
nor the understanding of industry development
that could have encouraged it instead to focus on
health or tourism, already either a local strength or
market. In the Newcastle case, the science city is
still underway and builds on the existing science
and biotechnology cluster. The jury is still out on
whether this kind of special provision can work in
the longer term to foster city innovation.
Gert-Jan Hospers (2008) also picks up on the
idea that ‘chance’ is the most likely determinant
of growth but he focuses on branding, on the cre-
ation of a realistic but inspiring image as a way to
bring local players together in a joint innovation
and development endeavour and to reshape
expectations about the ‘place’ concerned, to ‘give
chance a helping hand’. He uses the examples of
Austin (Texas), Manchester and Copenhagen to
show how each developed a brand that both
changed the external image of the city and city-
region and provide an umbrella for international
marketing of both place and products by local
firms and organisations. The image of an innova-
tive place is thus both a driver and a result of eco-
nomic, social and cultural regeneration and
innovation. The image, however, it is important
to note, requires investment in the underpinning
infrastructure – good housing and physical
aspect, airports, internal connections and cultural
facilities. Spin, however clever, is not enough.
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Most analysts of competitive cities describe
accessibility as critical to both economic develop-
ment and innovation. Transport is therefore at the
centre of much attention. In some cities new tech-
nology has been used as the basis for making trans-
port innovations, notably the driverless metro
trains that run in Paris, Copenhagen and else-
where and short term rent and ride bicycle initia-
tives, such as Velib in Paris, soon to be joined by a
similar experiment with cars, or the congestion
charge in London. Giuliano Mingardo (2008)
takes up the issue of innovative solutions to trans-
port and the associated sustainability issues facing
cities. He discusses the need to find ways of decou-
pling economic growth and transport growth, to
find ways of maintaining city accessibility but
without the environmental damage caused. Road
transport in particular is one of the demons city
governments have to deal with as it causes conges-
tion and air pollution with some of the most dan-
gerous emissions that threaten sustainability. Rail
and air travel demand huge investments in infra-
structure and have their own problems. Mingardo
(2008) focuses on London and Gothenburg to
show how, once again, packages of policies are key
– infrastructure and traffic management, not one
or the other. He also points to the need for strong
marketing of innovative solutions, a certain dose
of coercion and a willingness to link transport
change to personal issues such as health.
Creative people have been prominent in discus-
sions about what makes cities innovative ever since
the pioneering work of Florida (2000). Several
cities now make the attraction of such people part
of their innovation strategies on the assumption
that their presence will stimulate local business and
related innovation activities. In this volume, Nick
Leon (2008) picks up on the issue in a discussion
of how Barcelona is transforming an old industrial
area into the buzzy 22@Barcelona, the city’s flag-
ship innovative city zone, a mix of work and live
arrangements designed with attracting an interna-
tional prestige population in mind. Leon (2008)
points out that it is not enough simply to attract
innovative professionals, their sheer presence will
not do what is needed to stimulate local businesses
to greater levels of innovation. Rather, ways have to
be found to embed the newcomers in the local
economic arena. Doing so requires local gover-
nance of a more sophisticated kind which can
empathise with the needs of newcomers and link
their personal and economic lives. The paper by
Chen and Karwan (2008) on Shanghai shows that
the need for this new social innovation is not
restricted to Europe: the Chinese government, in
inviting in multinational enterprises with their
own innovation personnel, is rapidly finding that it
has to come to grips with the fact that, while the
economic growth engendered is truly spectacular,
the people come with multiple needs which may
require local social innovations in a way unforeseen
by economic development planners.
The final section of the volume is devoted to
quite other aspects of what makes an innovative
city and especially how residents in such cities
can participate much more broadly in the devel-
opment planning and processes which will so
intimately affect how they live, where they live,
where and how they work and how they will get
and their multiple live-work activities. We also
know the need for educated personnel which all
analysts mention. What is much more rarely
mentioned, however, is how the personnel are to
be educated and trained in the most effective and
socially acceptable manner. Very little thought
seems to be given to education in the recent liter-
ature on innovation, especially not to education
at the secondary level or for the non-standard
school students that are often associated with
diverse city populations, except for vague recom-
mendations that more ‘creativity’ is needed.
In this volume, Florence McCarthy and Mar-
garet Vickers (2008) address three issues which are
central to the development of future innovation
personnel in a major city, Sydney. The first is the
fact that present day students at secondary level are
‘digital natives’ while their teachers are largely ‘digi-
tal immigrants’. This divide, say McCarthy and
Vickers (2008), means radical rethinking of teach-
ing methods and they suggest the broad scale use of
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‘service learning’, which takes students out of their
traditional classroom where they feel, in their own
words, that they are ‘powering down’, and presents
them with real world challenges which make use of
their skills and interest them more. While service
learning in itself is not new and work has been
done, especially in the US on non-classroom edu-
cation for credit, over several decades (OECD
1983), it has recently been taken up by some inno-
vative teacher-training courses for the mainstream.
Service learning can be an important means of
bringing digital natives along with the curriculum.
At issue is the failure by most formal education sys-
tems to break down the walls of the school in
recognition of the changing world outside the
doors. The second issue is the failure of the school
system in most countries to come to grips with the
fact that most secondary students now work in the
real world at the same time as they are in school.
Schools are organised for full time education, oper-
ating with hierarchical ‘old’ industrial structures,
when the economic world outside their walls has
shifted, taking place in small organisations with
flatter organisational structures, teamwork, sub-
contracting and other arrangements. Since students
are increasingly working as well as studying, even
when at school, innovative educational arrange-
ments need to be put in place to recognise the reali-
ties of part time schooling and to teach students
their rights and obligations at work. Thirdly, the
authors point out, cities are not all about relatively
well off people; many citizens are poor, are
migrants or refugees, and little effort is made to
provide the sometimes radically different educa-
tional experience which would help them integrate
and develop their own innovative potential.
The next two papers in the present volume
focus on the use of ICT technologies to transform
interactions between citizens and business, business
and business and residents and governments in our
cities. Many, perhaps the more radical innovations
cities are now going to have to undertake, will only
succeed if residents affected are on side. To get
them on side policymakers need to listen to their
viewpoints more quickly and easily and gain regu-
lar access to the enormous amounts of information
held by citizens. Many new ICT technologies can
help with this by enabling communication in quite
radical new ways. One paper (Donovan et al.
2008) details a European experiment with the use
of mobile phones for service delivery and commu-
nications between individuals and governments to
improve participation by residents in the ordinary
running of a city – concern with transport issues,
for example, or other service monitoring. The
ICING project discussed in the paper (Donovan et
al. 2008) was an EU research project involving
government to citizen interaction in cities in sever-
al countries. The second concerns similar develop-
ments in Korea (Lee et al. 2008). In that paper an
international group of colleagues tell us that the
Korean government is so keen on realising the
potential of the new technologies, known there as
U-infrastructure, that several cities are investing in
creating a U-city with aspects concerning U-life,
U-business and U-government.
These papers are just two examples from a bub-
bling innovation cauldron. Another is the Intelli-
gent Cities project run by Steve Curwell at the
University of Salford in the UK, which has built an
e-City platform technology. The project has built a
number of scenarios for use of the platform – the
development of the cultural and environmental
cities and others – and considers stakeholder and
provider roles as well as the technology (Intelligent
Cities Report; no date, probably 2007). To gauge
how far such developments had progressed, in 2006
the company Interlace-Invent published a survey of
‘mobile-ready’ cities around Europe and covered a
wide range of operating services – m-administration
in Spain, the UK, Germany and Italy, m-entertain-
ment in several countries, m-health in Italy, Spain,
Greece and Denmark, m-learning in Switzerland,
Denmark and Sweden as well as the very important
m-logistics in the UK, Finland, Denmark and
Switzerland, to give just some places and fields of
m-experimentation (Interlace-Invent 2006). Since
2006 doubtless much more is happening.
All this experimentation that is taking place in
city innovation and development has been
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Volume 10, Issue 2–3, October–December 2008 IINNNNOOVVAATTIIOONN:: MMAANNAAGGEEMMEENNTT,, PPOOLLIICCYY&& PPRRAACCTTIICCEE
described in this volume in relation principally to
the aims and implementation of specific pro-
grams. Monitoring and learning across these
experiments is also critical. As yet there seems to
be little systematic cross-fertilisation between the
innovating cities concerned as their projects
mature and can be evaluated. Thinking that
exchange of views on some of the methods used
by Hamburg, Barcelona and Singapore would be
useful, the three cities got together in early 2008
to compare notes and provide second opinions on
the planning tasks at hand while also recognising
their differences in structure, level of investments
and governance. They decided to establish an
Urban Innovation Observatory to record methods
used and progress made in developing successful
Third Generation Innovation Environments. The
Observatory will become a critical resource of new
ideas, urban innovation concepts and implemen-
tation strategies that can be directly linked to real
time stakeholder interests. It will also be a place
for thought-leaders from across the world to test
and exchange ideas that could influence urban
innovation environments and develop further
their cross-border links to other hub cities engaged
in global innovation circuits through companies,
institutions and individuals (Jan Annerstedt, per-
sonal communication, September 2008).
The final paper in the volume, by a team from
the City Futures Research Centre in Sydney(Pin-
negar, Marceau & Randolph 2008), returns the
reader to the basis of cities – their built fabric,
the bricks and mortar or steel and concrete envi-
ronments in which everybody spends their time
and in which innovation takes place. The built
environment (BE) is important day and night,
for all city activities. It is also responsible for a
very large percentage of greenhouse gas emis-
sions, during building, during occupation and
use, during renovation and removal. Since cities
are by definition built environments, what hap-
pens in that environment is a central part of both
innovation in the city and the good functioning
of an innovative city. Yet it is an aspect of inno-
vation in cities that is much neglected by innova-
tion theorists, with some notable exceptions such
as Gann and his colleagues at Imperial College,
London, and such groups as the Cooperative
Research Centre in Construction Innovation
(Hampson, Manley and others) in Brisbane,
Australia. Most research in the field (outside
urban studies programs) focuses on building
technologies, which are indeed important, but it
is their use as city assets that is understudied and
presents in many ways the greatest challenges.
The technologies needed for sustainable build-
ing, for example, are largely already available but
creating incentives for their use on a large scale
are less well developed: Brandon, Heng and Shen
(2005), for example, point out that some really
powerful technologies for aspects of construction
itself are now available but the tipping point for
this ‘conservative industry’ has not yet arrived
(2005:286).
Innovative policies for the BE are now essential.
The complexities of the BE make joined-up
research and policy practice mandatory if innova-
tion policies of any kind are to succeed. And cities
of the future are mostly with us now – built to last
several decades, they will not soon disappear from
their present guise. Retrofitting the built environ-
ment is now key to successful innovation in many
fields. Retrofitting by definition disturbs all
aspects of citizens’ lives and presents a critical chal-
lenge to city managers and policymakers.
This special edition of the IMPP aims to draw
the attention of analysts, practitioners and policy-
makers, as well as businesses and communities, to
the critical importance of what happens in cities
to our common future. If ever there was an issue
which is both urgent and complex and deserving
of concerted attention by all major agents of
change it is cities. In western countries over recent
decades, cities have gone from being viewed as
centres of problems to being seen as the motors of
the good life everyone aspires to; cities have been
both neglected and rediscovered as a focus of con-
cern for reasons of national health and wellbeing.
It is now time to show how innovative cities and
innovation in cities, the fulcrum of modern
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IINNNNOOVVAATTIIOONN:: MMAANNAAGGEEMMEENNTT,, PPOOLLIICCYY&& PPRRAACCTTIICCEEVolume 10, Issue 2–3, October–December 2008
dilemmas of sustainability, wealth creation and
distribution, infrastructure investments, poverty
and exclusion reduction, work as well as play, can
be made to work effectively and sustainably for
the good of all. Cities are where innovation hap-
pens; we now need to make sure we have innova-
tive solutions to the hairy and complex problems
facing us as well as the innovative momentum to
keep economic growth and wealth creation going
in the directions we collectively choose. New tech-
nologies will come to our aid; the challenge is the
political and social will to use them and do so sen-
sibly and speedily and ensure that the communi-
ty’s capacity to be full partners in the difficult joint
and innovative decisions that must be made.
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