On February 4, an innovation workshop was held at the Secretariat of the Guangzhou International Award for Urban Innovation (the Guangzhou Award). The event was co-organized by Guangzhou Institute for Urban Innovation (the Institute) and UCLG Community on Urban Innovation (the Community) with more than a dozen scholars from various universities and research bodies attended.

The workshop was organized as a follow-up after the 2nd cycle of the Guangzhou Award, aiming at gaining a deeper understanding of the case studies and best practices generated from the competition; planning field studies to cities whose initiatives were shortlisted; as well as setting the boundary for the newly-emerged discipline “Urban Innovation”.

At the first half of the round table, attending representatives discussed means to make good use of the repositories of the Guangzhou Award and measures to replicate these best practices to inspire innovative thinking of other cities around the globe. Talking on how to tap the potential of case studies and best practices, most representatives believed that the research team should dig deeper into these cases in order to generate more insights. “A large number of case studies are valuable assets, but further field studies and more thorough analysis needs to be done to exploit its full potential.” President Liang Guiquan from the Institute shared his view. All attending representatives noticed that there had been a few new features regarding the shortlisted initiatives selected from the 2nd cycle of the Guangzhou Award. They were more practically-based and their implementation relied more on the joint efforts of both public and private sectors.

During the second half of the round table, discussions were based around how to define the discipline of urban innovation. “Urban innovation is an elastic concept, which should be defined within the domain of urban sustainable development,” said Nicholas You, Director and Global Partner of the Institute, Advisor to the Guangzhou Award. A brainstorming section had pinned down the concept of urban innovation as a discipline based on real problems facing cities that are in the process of urbanization, whose main purpose is to study how to tackle these problems, and whose development depends on the joint efforts of local authority, for-profits firms as well as international organizations.

A field study plan for this year was also set during the workshop, which listed a series of research field trips to 15 shortlisted cities, led by the Institute, the Community along with strategic partners and stakeholders from around the world.