Description
The assessment of the innovation readiness of a city aims to enhance the understanding of the city’s capability and readiness in deploying or enabling the deployment of mobility innovations. This entails understanding the city’s organisational structure, capability and capacity, current regulation practices, engagement practices, financial strength, investment opportunities, etc.
The elements of an innovative urban mobility ecosystem presented in the previous page can be viewed from the angle of innovation readiness through the following sub-elements
| City Elements | Sub-elements | Description |
| Innovative Governance & Growth | Inter-departmental coordination | Describes the structure and the dedicated departments of a city to better implement innovative mobility solutions |
| Mobility Planning | Depicts the current regulatory framework of the city against passenger and freight transportation (existence of Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan (SUMP) & Sustainable Urban Logistic Plan (SULP)) | |
| Laison | Shows the level of Public-Private Partnerships and corporations taking part in the city | |
| Public Investments | Represents to what extent the city has ensured funding for innovative mobility solutions | |
| Climate and City Typology | Openness | Concerns about the networking of the city by assessing the level of national and international synergies of the city’s institutes |
| Science & Education | Constitutes the educational level of the inhabitants and the number of the research institutes and universities located in the city | |
| Smart & Easily accessible | Transparency & Accountability | Corresponds to the level of the transparency of governmental processes and the availability and the level of accessibility of urban mobility data |
| Safe & Secure | No sub-elements identified - This element is mainly related to the liveability dimension | - |
| Smart & Innovative Resources and Infra available | Data Availability | Refers to how developed the data collection system is in a city (e.g. physical surveys or infrastructure to observe)? |
| Cities Capacity | Explains the level of capacity the city has to adopt innovation by using/providing specialists and having evidence-driven policy-making and to what extent the city has the infrastructure to help adopt innovative mobility solutions. | |
| Innovative People & Stakeholders | Culture | Shows the direction of the city and habitats towards innovation by assessing the city’s previous experience of implementing Innovative Business models and the acceptance/trend of the users towards green modes. |
| Industry Diversity | Identifies the smartness of the city’s industry by considering the number of big innovators (start-up & high-tech companies) that are established in the city |
If you are interested in conducting an exercise to assess the readiness of your city to deploy innovative mobility solutions, please go to the online SPROUT Innovation Readiness Assessment Tool.
To facilitate the self-assessment of a city’s innovation readiness, the Innovation Readiness tool is recommended. By using this self-assessment tool, the cities can identify if they are capable and ready to deploy or enable the deployment of mobility innovations.
The tool includes 21 questions for the 11 sub-elements described before, and the city could answer in a 0-5 scale range. A detailed description of each scale was provided with concrete examples to facilitate the whole process. The maturity and readiness of the city to develop city-led innovations and innovative policy responses is the actual result of the use of the tool.
For the details of the relevant methodology, you can also check out SPROUT D5.2 Urban Policy System Dynamics.
After assessing the innovation readiness of the city, an assessment of the liveability aspects would be the recommended next step.
SPROUT materials and tools
Data required
Expert and practical knowledge about the city. The self-assessment tool is based on a set of questions
Further information
This section builds on SROUT Deliverable D5.2 Urban policy system dynamics model, authored by E. Xenou, D. T. Touloumidis, and G. Ayfantopoulou (CERTH).
