Case Study Library

Drone as a First Responder (DFR) is the new paradigm in emergency management that allows emergency personnel to view live video feeds of incidents before they arrive on the scene. The Chula Vista, CA Police Department (CVPD) routinely deploys drones to emergency calls and provides incident management and a live video feed to officers. This live video, or Decision Quality Data (DQD), gives first responders critical information to plan the best tactics and response to an emergency.

The project was inspired by the need to promote coding in Greek primary education. It fostered the exploration of the actual use of digital technologies in the Schools, the way new technologies could transform School classrooms into real labs and the level of impact in the improvement of the digital skills of teachers and pupils.

The Internet is a great communication tool. People use it all the time both at work and for leisure, but what about interacting with the government? Even though most of the Portuguese public services are digital, its use was below expectations. The answer was the creation of a network of Citizen Spots, which are multiservice physical counters where a “specialized mediator” assists citizens accessing online public services and teaches them how to perform them autonomously thereafter.

The Arlington Restaurant Initiative (ARI) is a voluntary accreditation program which aims to increase safety and economic viability for restaurants and special events in Arlington County, VA. The Police Department has partnered with County agencies to establish a holistic approach to nightlife management and raise standards of restaurants that serve alcohol. ARI has been successful in reducing alcohol-related violence and building mutually-beneficial relationships with stakeholders.

Combining Design Thinking and Rapid Impact Evaluation methodologies allows for a user-centered counterfactual to measure the impact of the current program design, while simultaneously identifying programmatic design flaws and generating solutions for improvement. The participative process for co-developing the counterfactual triangulates multiple user perspectives and data sets to provide new lines of evidence to pursue innovative solutions and offer a more iterative approach to evaluation.

SciTech DiploHub is a pioneering nonprofit public-private partnership backed by leading research centers, universities, non-profits, startups, corporations and public institutions that deploy Barcelona's science and technology diplomacy strategy. It has the mandate to elevate the role of science, technology, and cities in foreign policy and make Barcelona a more influential player on the global stage through its contribution to sustainable development and the global public good.

The iSPEX is a small attachment that can be fitted to any mobile phone to measure particulate matter in the air. The fact that this piece of technology empowers anyone to monitor air quality (citizen science) creates a raft of new possibilities to collect large volumes of data in a highly efficient and cost-effective manner. Aside from that, it raises awareness of particulate matter among the population.

Organisational development in a municipality within a framework set by the municipal council is not new. However, a local authority can still be innovative in how it designs such development and the role employees play in it. In Nijkerk (approx. 43,000 inhabitants), this has led to an organisation made up of 28 self-managing teams that come directly under the authority of the municipal clerk. Nijkerk went through a process where employees and the development of their talent came first.

The 3D map of the Netherlands has been available from the Dutch Land Registry Office since 2014 on an open data basis. This map is intended as a basic file that institutions from across the public and private sector can use for their purposes, such as to link data to and run analyses. It can, for example, be used to assess and calculate how wind turbines affect the local environment in terms of noise, flows of air, and the shadows they cast, but also to assess their visual impact in the…

The municipality of Zeist (approx. 64,000 inhabitants) faced the challenge of having to cut its spending by 6.2 million euros. A decision was made to take the innovative approach of engaging with citizens in a social discussion on possible spending cuts. Through this process of co-creation with its residents, the Zeist local authority not only managed to balance the budget, but it has also helped the local authority forge closer ties with the community and garner broader support for cutbacks.