Insights on today´s cities as future markets for system innovations?

Cities provide the markets of tomorrow

Already today cities are the biggest entities of industrial and economic activity and the growth of urban populations is steadily increasing. By 2030 the number of people living in cities will rise to five billion, resulting in great challenges to infrastructure, economic development and life-quality induced by scarce resources, climate change and the mere number of people. Addressing the city of tomorrow and its markets therefore requires a new way of thinking for almost every industry sector. Conventional single-consumer-related products have to be replaced by integrated approaches forming whole urban systems: A new relationship of information, resources, products and users will lie at the heart of the innovation loop that cities have to master within the next decades.

Fraunhofer develops solutions for future cities

In anticipation of this development the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is launching a joint research initiative on the most important sectors for the cities of tomorrow – mobility, energy, communications, buildings, resources and governance. Together with industrial partners it will thereby lay the foundation for creating smart and sustainable system innovations for future cities.

We invite industries and enterprises that want to shape future urban markets, to join this project in order to learn from global best practices today and to develop the smart and sustainable urban solutions of tomorrow.

Project approach and framework

The joint research project »Morgenstadt - City Insights« is designed as enabler for new collaborations of industry and research in the task of transforming our cities into smart and sustainable environments. Therefore the current project stage scheduled for eighteen months and starting in May 2012 contains the following work packages:

• Work package 1: Analyze urban best practice worldwide (4 months)
  Which best practices, challenges and collaboration approaches do already exist?
  This step covers the capture of today´s challenges, concepts and visions on the partner level and the identification and assessment of a wide range of innovative projects and best practices focusing on existing urban technology systems. The methodology will be based on expert interviews and meta-studies of existing knowledge and approaches.
• Work package 2: Explore leading cities in on-site field research (12 months)
  What is the local situation for world´s leading cities on the way to a smart and sustainable future?
  Researchers will spend several months for an on-site and in-depth analysis in leading cities like New York, Berlin, Shanghai, Amsterdam, Singapore and others identified in the previous analyses. For each case study a detailed report will be compiled, giving insight on prevailing solutions, challenges and successful actor-constellations as links for further initiatives.
• Work package 3: Identify requirements for innovative concepts (2 months)
  What are the requirements, drivers and needs for today´s and tomorrow´s urban systems?
  By integrating the identified solutions for urban technology sectors into one systemic and cross-sectoral approach, companies will get support to develop unique solutions for entering new markets for sustainable urban systems. The result will be an exclusive summary of the preceding research covering a wide range of global best practice, several in-depth reports on leading cities and a deducted compilation of innovative concepts for a further development in the ongoing joint research initiative.

Target groups

The joint research project provides valuable information for different kinds of target groups. Relating to the previously identified research sectors mobility, energy, communications, buildings, resources and governance the initiative addresses the following industry stakeholders with an international or multinational focus:

• Mobility solution provider
• Energy technology supplier
• Information and Communication provider
• Building technology and construction industry
• Infrastructure provider for resource management
• Stakeholders in the field of urban governance
• Cities and NGO’s