Scaling up smart city innovations

This article focuses on the challenge of upscaling, with illustrative examples from the DIACCESS project. In that project, the Swedish city of Växjö is developing a range of smart city innovations, and it has developed a vision on how these innovations can be scaled up.

People and organizations everywhere are working to make the city more sustainable, more circular and climate-proof. Sustainable innovations cannot be bought, we have to make them ourselves by trial and error to find out whether a new approach works or not. It's not just about deploying new technology – although it often starts with that. There are organizational, financial, legal and behavioural aspects to every smart city project, and they must be dealt with simultaneously.

In order to move forward, cities all over the world have embraced experimentation: the city can be seen as a living laboratory where new techniques and concepts are tested in the field of mobility, sustainable energy, sustainable construction, logistics, and so on. Experiments and new approaches are supported and encouraged by innovation subsidies, among others from Urban Innovative Actions. But what happens when the experiment ends? How can successful experiments be turned into permanent innovations and adopted on a larger scale?