Category: Featured Initiatives

Studying and Accelerating Innovation for Smarter Cities and Institutions

Studying and Accelerating Innovation for Smarter Cities and Institutions

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SMARTER CITIES

INSTITUTIONAL INNOVATION

CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT

Smarter Cities

We help local governments, city administrations and municipalities:

  • Map their own administration innovation ecosystem.
  • Identify development opportunities in priority areas for administrations and citizens.
  • Develop innovation agendas and roadmaps based on existing internal innovation drivers.
  • Build smarter public-private partnerships and new funding mechanisms based on incremental development and quick wins.
  • Make their programs and cities smarter places to live.

We help urban tech companies:

  • Design and implement co-development innovation strategies with local governments, city administrations and municipalities
  • Design and implement impact assessment systems

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Institutional Innovation

We study political, economic and social institutions to advice national and regional authorities, civil society and the private sector on how to modernize human systems and make the world a freer place to live.

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Capacity Development

We create, design and implement educational curricula, programs, workshops and executive training modules for governments, universities and firms seeking to incorporate the Sustainable Development Goals in their business models and operations.

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Smarter NYC Case Studies

Smarter NYC Case Studies

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How City Agencies Innovate

The “Smart(er) NYCitywide Research Group” was created by André Corrêa d’Almeida with scholars from 13 universities and research institutes, with the goal of developing case studies aiming at examining how innovation from within the New York City government is making urban systems smarter and shaping people’s lives. The focus is on how city agencies have been adapting to and adopting new data and technology innovations to make their management systems more inclusive and responsive to decision making and citizens, their success, failures and replicability. These case studies will be published by Columbia University Press in the spring of 2018. In addition to this single-city project with New York City (U.S.) the initiative also includes a cities-cluster project with Lisbon and Cascais (Portugal). This “Smart(er) City” initiative is also being expanded to the UK, China and Latin America.

General Objective and Research Questions

The School of International and Public Affairs’ (SIPA) Master of Public Administration in Development Practice (MPA – DP) Program of Columbia University (CU) is partnering with The City of New York in an effort, led by Professor André Corrêa d’Almeida, to map the ecology of innovation in NYC. More specifically, the case studies will be based on smart city initiatives identified across city agencies. The project’s unifying objectives are to:
  • Describe the process of how specific smart city innovations were initiated, developed and implemented within NYC agencies;
  • Reveal key roles, interactions, decisions, challenges and best practices that contributed to successful innovation and solutions;
  • Uncover behavioral aspects capable of hindering creativity and innovation across city agencies;
  • Identify institutional elements, incentives and contextual variables that fostered innovation;
  • Highlight organizational attributes that supported innovation;
  • Discuss how NYC’s programs compare to a sample of similar programs around the world;
  • Describe outcomes and discuss the assessment and impact of the initiatives;
  • Recommend next-generation enhancements to these programs; discuss how NYC’s innovation policies can facilitate growth of these programs; discuss the “way forward” for optimizing benefits for NYC;
  • Showcase NYC as an incubator and test-bed for innovative smart city initiatives and help reimagine bottom-up possibilities that emerge from within public administration.

NYC Case Studies

Strong and Just City
Business More Local
Free Wifi for NYC
Real Time Water Use
Ending Traffic Deaths
Gunshot Detection
Reliable Energy
Zero Waste in NYC
Improving Transportation
Data Analytics
Urban Air Monitoring
Detecting Outbreaks

Institutional Innovation Studies

Institutional Innovation Studies

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The Modernization of the Political System in Portugal, Democracy and Civic Participation

In order to stimulate systematic and multidisciplinary research in the fields of politico-institutional reform, democracy and civic participation in Portugal, the Catholic University of Portugal’s Research Center on Peoples and Cultures created a new research program under the scientific and editorial coordination of André Corrêa d’Almeida.

The goal of this new research program is toward a scientific contribution for the development of a reconciliatory ethics in politics, which is capable of addressing the politico-institutional barriers that compromise both sustainable development and the legitimate individual and collective aspirations of the Portuguese people. While research proposals can focus on any of the three fields listed in the title of this announcement, all proposals should include at minimum (1) a problem formulation section; (2) a national historical perspective of the subject being researched; (3) an international comparative analysis; (4) alternative solution-based scenarios; and (5) a discussion on the role of new information and communication technologies in supporting any proposed resolutions.

The topics currently being studied are:

– “The Parliamentarian Status: a renewed approach” by Pedro Duarte Silva and José Eduardo Reis.

– “Electoral Law: discussion and alternatives” by Alexandra Carreira and Ana Luisa Oliveira.

– “Modernization of the Political Parties and Campaigns Funding Systems” by Luís Miguel Oliveira and Miguel Brito.

– “The Legislative Responsiveness of the Portuguese Parliament: from the electoral programs to the European Union” by Patricia Calca.

– “Civic Participation and Role/Power of Journalism” by Ricardo Alexandre.

For more studies on institutional innovation please visit ARCx’s “Publications” page.