1. SHORT DESCRIPTION of the PILOT PROBLEM/CHALLENGE

The URBAN INNO pilot activities were focused on the innovation of Urban Food Network in the City of Košice, improving the rural-urban linkages with the surrounding areas of Košice region, Slovakia. The effort led to the development of a digital marketplace of agricultural products to match the local production of the rural areas with the demand mainly from urban areas. This virtual marketplace will enable citizens, restaurants, canteens and other customers in the city of Košice to buy products directly from local farmers of various sizes – from single individuals and families to large producers. The activities also cover, innovation of other subsidiary processes connected to this economic activity.

These challenges can be described by many complex interlinked relationships among variety of national, regional and local actors and their different needs and requirements. The participatory approach, exploiting the benefit of the Living Lab method, was therefore an essential step in order to reach the goals in sustainable way. The chosen LEADERS methodology of the Living Lab approach covers different levels of governance – from strategic to operational – caught in the following step/blocks of actions:

L - Localise and identify your stakeholders

E - Establish a Living Lab PPP (Public Private Partnership)

A - Assess the relevance of regional issues

D – Deploy an ICT infrastructure

E - Establish a local/regional PPPP community (PPP + People)

R - Run User Driven / Open Innovation pilots

S - Summarise and evaluate the results

2. STARTING INTERACTION AND ICT TOOLS USED

The interaction with the stakeholders was a long-run procedure. As the starting point of interaction, the analysis of regional environment and relevant actors was conducted to identify the potential partners and the set of smaller group of mostly relevant partners – acting as connectors to others - to be involved from the very beginning.

Following that, the set of several bi- and multilateral meetings took place all over the region, covering policy level partners, business support organizations, businesses, research and innovation actors, civil society organizations and citizens, all with the aim to firstly understand their various needs and motivations in order to attract them for interaction within the design of the pilot activities.

At later stage, we opened up to review of concept and new ideas outside of the region of implementations – the concept of the pilot activities was presented at two external thematic events. This resulted in joint implementation of various complementary initiatives and enlarged community of stakeholders being involved in the pilot.

The interaction phase was realized mainly via personal meetings, supplemented by on-line communication channels, like e-mails, and shared document management systems.