Building collaborative platforms for urban innovation: Newcastle City Futures as a quadruple helix intermediary

Abstract

There is a growing academic and policy interest in the notion of using cities as ‘living laboratories’ to develop and test responses to the social, environmental and economic challenges present in contemporary urbanism. These living laboratories are often assumed to function through ‘quadruple helix’ relations between varied actors from the public, private, university and community sectors. However, empirical research that explores the real-world functioning of these arrangements is comparatively limited. This paper will help address this gap through the case of Newcastle City Futures (NCF) – a university-anchored platform for collaborative urban foresight research, public engagement and innovation. In particular, the paper will concentrate on a two-year period when NCF focused on the facilitation of innovation demonstrator projects guided by the vision of Newcastle upon Tyne developing a postindustrial future as a ‘test-bed city’. Detailed empirical accounts of the development of two demonstrator projects are used to illustrate and analyse processes of cross-sectoral collaboration and engaging the public in co-design. These are used to support the conceptual argument that the presence of the quadruple helix as a form of local innovation system should not be taken as given. Instead, the collaborative relationships required for transformational interventions in the future of cities need to be actively constructed by diverse actors and supported by intermediary vehicles such as NCF.

Assembling Sustainable Smart City Transitions: An Interdisciplinary Theoretical Perspective

“…The adoption of such technologies can help address the sustainability issues affecting urban sociotechnical systems, reinstate the necessary equilibrium, and trigger regime change (Smith et al, 2010). Examples of smart city innovations include new smart city technologies (Zanella et al, 2014), business models for smart cities (Timeus et al, 2020), new market and institutional arrangements (Vallance et al, 2020), new technological acceptance models (Sepasgozar et al, 2019), and design principles for smart city development (Mora et al, 2019b).…”

“…During smart city transitions, complementary smart city projects are launched, which transform the urban environment in a vibrant construction site (Caird and Hallett, 2019). Their implementation generates patterns of coevolution within an expanding collaborative ecosystem which puts open innovation principles, user-centric and bottom-up development, and entrepreneurship at the service of sustainable urban development (Cohen et al, 2016;Vallance et al, 2020). In this collaborative environment, niche and regime actors join forces in order to frame new sociotechnical configurations that work.…”

Urban Planning and European Innovation Policy: Achieving Sustainability, Social Inclusion, and Economic Growth?

“…First, that technological innovation did not sufficiently address societal issues and was, therefore, doomed to fail its objectives of achieving sustainability, social inclusion, and economic growth, but especially social inclusion (see [8]). Second, that "experts" could not innovate enough for sustainability and social justice to finally prevail, and so the inclusion of "lay knowledge" and "citizens" in decision-making and innovation processes was considered paramount-see, for example, the move from a triple helix innovation model (that is, one resulting from the intertwining of universities, industry, and government) as conceptualized by authors such as Etzkowitz ( [38], see also [39] and [40]), to the quadruple helix model (that is, one resulting from the collaborations among universities, industry, government, and citizens) [41][42][43].…”

Do carbon emissions accelerate low-carbon innovation? Evidence from 285 Chinese prefecture-level cities

“…The combination of low-carbon policies and their implementation is vital for companies to determine their low-carbon innovation expenditure plans (Lo 2014 ; Rogge and Schleich 2018 ). For these reasons, studies start to focus on innovative activities from the city level (Vallance et al 2020 ; Song et al 2020 ).…”