Open innovation looks towards smarter cities

Over the last few years there has been considerable attention given to how cities will evolve over the coming years. Much of this has been led by companies such as IBM and Cisco who have been pioneering the use of smart sensors and other such devices to help urban planners and policy makers mould cities that are flexible and adaptive.

This year has seen government officials begin to sit up and take notice. The UK government’s Foresight department are currently producing a report on the future of cities, which will try and understand some of the medium to long-term changes in society that will influence the development of cities.

As interesting, if not more so, is a new EU competition that will be applying open innovation to smart cities. The project will offer $400,000 in prizes for new applications that can be used to build smarter cities.

There is a slight caveat with the project however in that any entries to the competition have to build upon the pre-existing building blocks deployed by the EU’s project to build the core platform of the Internet of the future. There are something like 50 such blocks currently freely available through the FI-Ware Open Innovation Lab.

These building blocks provide generic functions that can be used by a range of different applications from sectors like cloud hosting, big data analysis, identity management or the internet of things.

The following prizes are on offer for the competition: