At the Smart City Expo World Congress 2025, the session Inclusive Innovation: Delivering Effective Solutions in Cities and Communities brought together city representatives, private businesses, and EU representatives to explore how innovation can be designed and deployed to truly serve people and places.
Moderated under the EU for Resilient Green Cities umbrella, the discussion featured Davide Miceli (City of Turin), Hervé Dupuy (HaDEA), Elodie Thirion (EISMEA), Edgar Valverde Estrella (PNO Innovation), Dr Chrysi Laspidou (University of Thessaly), and Dr Callie Persic (Belfast City Council). Matteo Satta (ANCI Toscana), coordinator of the ClimabBorough project, moderated.
Opening the session, Elodie Thirion highlighted the European Commission’s continued commitment to fostering innovation ecosystems that are both inclusive and impactful, referencing the European Capital of Innovation Award, and pointing to the host city, Barcelona, being the first ever celebrated as the winner of the Award in 2014.
“Across Europe, cities are at the forefront of innovation and they are the entities embodying inclusive and transformative innovation”, she said and added, “The Innovation Capital Awards not only award cities that lead through innovation but also those that light the path for others to follow.”
Hervé Dupuy of HaDEA presented the 5G for Smart Communities initiative, supporting 47 projects across Europe with a total budget of €242.5 million. He underlined the importance of digital infrastructure that serves citizens directly, from healthcare and education to transport and climate resilience.
Edgar Valverde Estrella from PNO Innovation emphasised the role of effective collaboration between innovators, public authorities, and citizens in scaling up successful pilot projects. He pointed to how he represented multiple EU projects, and addressed both governance and citizen inclusion:
“We need to make sure that everyone knows when and how they need to participate. Governance models are extremely important to facilitate this form of cooperation,” he said on the topic of inclusive innovation, which he sees increasingly prevalent:
“In the future, we see European innovation having inclusion as a requirement, not just for the granting bodies but in the communities too,” he said.
Dr Chrysi Laspidou introduced the ENHANCE project, which combines AI-powered analytics, Copernicus satellite data, and citizen science to improve coastal zone management in Greece and Spain. The project applies a One Health approach, linking environmental resilience to community wellbeing.
Dr Callie Persic from Belfast City Council described how the city’s Net Zero Neighbourhood Framework puts people and place at the centre of the transition. Focused on active travel, greening, and retrofitting, the approach ensures climate neutrality efforts contribute to a fair and just transition.
“What we want to do through our NetZero work is to connect our city to itself. That’s why we fundamentally began with Citizen engagement, because it is about working with others and finding solutions to meet the needs that are already there. In the UP2030 project, we rooted the effort in where people are at and what they want,” she said and added later:
“We drilled down and looked at how to engage with people. We used data, consciously, to inform about what’s happening in their own neighbourhoods. It helped them look at these issues in a different way.”
Closing out the list of speakers, Davide Miceli showcased Turin’s efforts through the CLIMABOROUGH project, which is helping bridge the gap between urban innovation design and implementation. Turin’s initiatives, RiVestiTO and Traccia-TO, are improving textile waste management while engaging citizens in co-creating sustainable solutions.
“We had the possibility to engage in innovation and experiment in procuring from private companies,” he said and stressed the City of Turin’s emphasis on citizen engagement and the approach they take:
“Collaborate to solve the issues through events, laboratories and even podcasts - all activities that should help the municipality and make people more aware of the activities going on.”
Together, the speakers highlighted, from different perspectives, how inclusive innovation can help transform cities, but only do so successfully if we ensure that technological, environmental, and social solutions are designed with communities, not just for them.