The BETTER (Stimulating Regional Innovation through Better E-government Services) project involved partners from 4 other EU Member States to improve project and policy design on thematic areas pertinent to major opportunities in the West Midlands economy. This included supporting initiatives providing SME support and capitalising on opportunities presented by e-Commerce and e-Government. This in turn provided support for initiatives to provide better: health; data management capability; air quality and transport. The Birmingham element of the project resulted in attracting West Midlands Innovation Funding to test out the approach developed original in Gavle, Sweden for ‘Service Design’ in a project called Digital Innovation In Public Services (DIPS).
5 municipalities participated in the project including: Birmingham, UK; Genoa, Italy; Tartu, Estonia; Gavle, Sweden and Nyiregyhaza, Hungary.
BETTER offered an innovative approach to a key priority for the EU by encouraging public authorities to develop Regional Innovation Strategies in which e-government solutions can stimulate regional innovation chains (as well as improve their services). The key components of the project are the development and application of:
Birmingham City Council’s aims in BETTER were to:
achieve a 10% increase in regional innovation activity stimulated by eGovernment initiatives by 2022 by:
By participating in the BETTER project BCC aimed to foster a policy environment which would provide:
Better air quality/transport in the city and region through improved infrastructure and enabling technologies.
From this exchange of experience, a Digital Innovation in Public Services (DIPS) project of activity was developed and funded within the investment strand of the West Midlands Innovation Programme. This proposal was aimed at Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) and service departments in the Local Authority to consider and address citizen challenges.
The key partners in the delivery of the project were Birmingham City University (BCU) for design thinking methods and Bruntwood Ltd for business support for SMEs to commercialise innovation.
The DIPS project consisted of six stages: 1) Challenge definition by BCC Service Departments 2) Invitation of solutions (SMEs) 3) Exploration, 4) Business Accelerator run by Innovation Birmingham/Bruntwood to develop the ideas 5) A prototype phase and lastly 6) pre-commercialisation.
There were four City Council Departments with identified challenges – Adult Social Care, the Public Health Food Team, Planning and Development and Transport (Transport for West Midlands).
The project completed its “challenge definition” stage by late 2021.
The challenges tested out by BCC Service Departments included:
Food Hub approaches, focusing on sustainable food in local communities, connecting local producers to city residents and an urban farm,
Town Planning processes – an online consultation service for citizens
Transport to develop self-organizing community hubs and
Adult Social Care to pilot new approaches to user-based needs.
The key objective is to focus Council Officers on procurement through design thinking on city challenges.
Local SMEs produced prototypes addressing these challenges.
The outcome: the project established a structured challenge-based system enabling intrapreneurship in the public sector and developing a new mechanism for public sector procurement.
The experience shared by Tartu (Smart Tartu) based on citizen challenges around common problems was extremely insightful. The Deputy Director for the Innovation Alliance West Midlands, the regional lead for promoting innovation and the technology sector, attended the thematic events in Gavle and Tartu and heard how the Estonian government works with SMEs to develop and procure smart city solutions and the supporting experiences of the Gavle Innovation Service. Both examples feature Design Thinking approaches.
E Estonia was subsequently invited to present to regional stakeholders and companies at the Smart City Alliance regional event in 2021. The link between innovation and unlocking barriers to procurement to tackle city challenges was evident from these exchanges.
Gavle and Tartu showed the clear benefit of following a challenge led approach with local citizens which was further explored by Birmingham in Thematic Event (TE) #3 on Design Thinking. Tartu and Gavle presented details of this approach to Birmingham stakeholders (including the regional Black Country Consortium) as Birmingham’s approach was being designed and subsequently when the prototype ideas were being further developed for a project submission to the West Midlands Innovation Programme.
Birmingham City Council staff learnt a great deal in the Thematic Event sessions and Study Visits from the SME led examples of Velvet in Tartu and from Future Position X in Gavle around “Design Thinking”. The experience of e-Estonia which is fundamentally a systems approach, was insightful, as was the experience of Liguria Digitale for Genoa in providing a digital platform for citizen interaction and SME engagement. Furthermore, the Digital Renewal programme adopted in 2016 was showcased by Gavle at the Study Visit on 27th October 2021. The Gavle approach is based on the “Innovationsguiden” (service design) methodology which champions a holistic approach to public sector challenges which focuses on the end-user helping to develop the solution.
The Register of Good practices in the project informed the Thematic Events and Study Visits. Of particular significance was Genoa Smart City and Urban Dashboard, the E-Services inhouse team and Innovation Hub in Gavle, The Sandbox Programme in Tartu University and the online provision of local services in the Interactive Municipal Budget in Nyiregyhaza. Thematic Event (TE) 3 then brought together a focus on “design thinking” from the Good Practices and Study Visits which catalysed the activity for Birmingham in Action 1.
The key idea from these inputs to meet Birmingham’s objectives was focussed on procurement and how to enable and to support Birmingham City Council officers to learn from Good Practices and how to engage with citizens and SMEs to develop innovative solutions to city problems. The concept of adopting a procurement approach with identification of city challenges from BCC Service departments to then engage SMEs to jointly address through design thinking methods was seen as the way forward. The next step was to resource a project to test this policy approach.
Web design Adventure