URBAN INNO at the smartFAB consortium meeting
Representatives of the URBAN INNO project and Smart City Maribor initiative replied the invitation to participate at the smartFAB consortium meeting in Bologna. The event was held from 19th until 20th September 2016 within the organization of the City of Bologna, Italy and Fraunhofer ISE institute from Freiburg, Germany.
The main purpose of the meeting was to discuss the proposal to a SCC-2017 Horizon 2020 call, focusing on pilot projects regarding the implementation of ICT into sustainable mobility challenges, development of smart grid energy management and the use of participatory method solutions developed in URBAN INNO on such large scale Smart City Lighthouse project.
Representatives of URBAN INNO project and Smart City Maribor initiative presented project URBAN INNO as best practice on how to the urban innovation projects can contribute to strengthen citizen participation and open innovation through participatory methods in European regions. Practical examples of citizens' cooperation with the city were also presented in the form of developed participatory tools of Municipality of Maribor (e.g. Let’s improve Maribor).
The benefits we gained through the participation to this event were valuable networking to potential lighthouse cities and institutions involved in citizen participation topic in smart city context. Through this we gained possible future collaboration opportunities (e.g. collaboration of Maribor (and e-Zavod) as partners in Horizon Smart City call in 2017).
