Our division of Ferrovial Servicios, in cooperation with the company’s Innovation area and Citymart.com, the platform for innovation in municipal services, is launching “Cities Open Challenge by Ferrovial”.
This new initiative focuses on entrepreneurship and innovation and aims to identify transformative solutions for smart city development. City governments, citizens and Ferrovial will participate in the implementation of these solutions.
The challenge
Ferrovial Servicios proposes improving municipal service delivery in each of the seven participating cities:
A Coruña, Logroño, Málaga, Santander, Sevilla, Valencia and Vitoria.
The challenge is to identify technological solutions which improve citizen participation in the provision and optimisation of municipal services. Each city proposes the service which it is most interested in innovating.
How to participate/Who can participate
Entrepreneurs, SMEs, universities and research centres interested in participating must present their solutions via Citymart.com.
The solutions, which will be evaluated by Ferrovial Servicios experts and the various city governments, must be based on eight criteria: alignment with the challenge, the possibility of pilot testing, innovation, scalability, economic impact, environmental impact, cultural impact, and political impact.
The deadline for submitting solutions is 20 February 2014. In the next phase, a winner will be chosen for each city by means of two rounds of evaluation. The winning projects are expected to be announced in May 2014, and they will be implemented in the participating cities.
Commitment to entrepreneurs and innovation
The Cities Open Challenge enables us to renew our commitment to accelerating and developing entrepreneurship and innovation, two of the hallmarks of Ferrovial since its foundation 60 years ago.
One recent example of our experience in this area is the Zuritanken innovation initiative, implemented throughout the company. We also have innovation programmes under way with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other universities in Spain and elsewhere in Europe.
The Cities Open Challenge enables us to advance further and creates a new channel that supports initiatives which will drive development of the city of the future—the intelligent city.
Cities Open Challenge by Ferrovial: Engaging citizens in service delivery in cities.
