Thematic workshop "Smart City Strategy": Participants' feedback

At the beginning of the 2022 academic year, the Smart City Institute decided to expand its training offer for territorial actors with the launching of thematic workshops. While registrations for its second workshop dedicated to citizen participation are now open, it is time to take stock of the first workshop, which was held last September.

Organised over two days, it proposed to go back over the fundamentals of how to carry out a Smart City strategy. So, what did the participants think of it and what perspectives do they envisage thanks to the content covered?

Our colleague Cécile Caputo - in charge of training at the Institute - shares with us the feedback from the participants thanks to the exchanges and feedbacks collected during these two days.

The Smart City Institute's thematic workshops: What do they consist of?

First of all, let's briefly go over the concept of the thematic workshops:

•  Organised in a short format: 1 or 2 days
• They focus on a particular theme: Smart City strategy (#1), citizen participation (#2, March 2023) or monitoring and evaluation of Smart City initiatives (#3, May 2023)
• By applying a very practice-oriented methodology: exercises, group reflection sessions, brainstorming sessions based on collective intelligence, workshops, etc.

The idea, through this series of workshops, is to allow territorial actors from all sectors to deepen a specific topic related to the sustainable and smart transition of territories, through the discovery of concrete tools and methodologies, that can be directly applied within their respective organisations.

The Smart City Institute's thematic workshops

3 minutes to discover more about the methodology

What the participants appreciated 

"Based on the feedback from our participants following this first workshop, I noticed that they had identified several positive points", explains Cécile Caputo. Criteria such as :

• The trainer and his pedagogy as well as the quality of the speakers
• The up-to-date nature of the proposed content
• The interactivity generated and the networking it allows
• As well as the format of the workshop (duration and methodology)

"It would therefore seem that the objectives have been achieved, as SCI was hoping to provide a more dynamic dimension to this workshop, over a shorter period of time, in order to offer a complement to its continuing education course in Smart Cities Management, which is longer and, until now, more theoretical." 

Cécile Caputo also highlighted some of the participants' key comments:

What are the perspectives offered by the workshop?

Although several aspects of the training were appreciated, from an impact point of view, many participants said that this workshop will be useful for their professional life and that they will be able to put into practice what they have learned! In concrete terms, following this first workshop, our participants told us that they have already decided to take action by :

• Setting up public-private collaborations 
• Carrying out an evaluation of the Smart City maturity of their territory using the Smart City Maturity Model (SCMM)
• Defining or structuring their strategy, in particular through the 15 key steps presented in the Practical Guide to the Smart City - Volume 1 
• Raising awareness of the issue among their collaborators

For the participants, this workshop was a first step towards launching, accelerating or even optimising a sustainable and smart transition for their territory. However, the discussions also highlighted the fact that certain elements deserve to be further developed, in particular the aspects linked to

• The role and involvement of the different categories of actors in the Smart City dynamics (the private sector but also the citizens)
• The concrete implementation of the Smart City strategy
• The monitoring of Smart City approaches and projects

"Two of these three topics will be the subject of a dedicated workshop in March and May 2023," adds Cécile Caputo.

Discover the speakers' feedback in video

During this first workshop dedicated to the Smart City strategy, several inspiring sessions were proposed and animated by 3 experts from the Smart City Institute. They also gave us their feedback on their respective interventions:

Smart City Strategy Workshop: The experts' debrief

How did the sessions go and what were the key messages?