Resilience by orchestrating citizen-driven innovation through digital platforms in urban-rural constellations

The research project investigates how the resilience of municipalities can be improved by orchestrating citizen-driven innovation. Through the transdisciplinary involvement of civil society, municipalities can benefit from innovation impulses or hand over parts of the innovation process to civil society to be more agile in responding to crises and challenges, while at the same time enabling civil society to participate more by strengthening its own capacities. The aim is therefore to explore how an open digital innovation platform for municipalities should be designed so that innovators from civil society can organize themselves there at a low threshold to jointly develop solutions in crisis situations (possibly in cooperation with the municipality). As the problem areas of socio-environmental challenges in the context of sustainability (e.g. mobility, climate change, food supply, local recreation, housing, or education) in urban contexts tend to require a regional level in the sense of subsidiarity, another focus of the project is the interweaving of urban and rural areas as socially and functionally complementary spaces for the common good. In the design and provision of such a platform, the project also considers issues of data protection and the provision of such a platform, e.g. as a public service. Through the permanent and sustainable establishment of a digital platform for networking civil society actors in urban-rural constellations, the project aims to support municipalities in orchestrating citizen-driven innovations and to strengthen the resilience of a municipality's society and its spatial interdependencies.