Co-creation of a Namibian Smart Community (SmartCom)
Research summary
The Main goal of the SmartCom consortium is to develop, test and implement a concept of Smart Community for urban Africa together with the Namibian counterparts. The Project supports the development of Smart Community concept that is a societally and environmentally sustainable approach to urban development in Africa. SmartCom goes beyond the concept development and aims to provide tools, policy design and network to foster the emergence of business and innovation ecosystem between Finland and Namibia. The concept and policy design can be scaled-up to other countries later on.
Description
The SmartCom research project supports the development of Smart Community concept that is a socially and environmentally sustainable approach to urban development in Africa. The project studies, through a practical engagement, especially the concepts of responsible, inclusive and systemic innovation. There are parallel research and business processes going on to both design and build Smart Communities and to study how the concept can be further developed in responsible, inclusive and systematic way in Namibia.
SmartCom deploys participatory action research (PAR). PAR contrasts with many research methods which emphasize disinterested researchers, reproducibility of findings and observation of human behavior in the hope of eventually emerging meaningful change without researchers' intervention. Instead, PAR emphasizes participation and action and intends to make sense of the world through collective efforts to change it. Research is conducted with people instead of "on" or "for" people, in a collaborative manner that suits especially when the object of the study is co-creation processes and how to promote them.
The research project Co-creation of a Namibian Smart Community (2016-2018) is funded by the National Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation Tekes and Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland and by participating Finnish research partners and business organisations.
More information
Research info
Research title
Co-creation of a Namibian Smart Community (SmartCom)
Research timeline
1.6.2016 - 1.10.2018
Keywords
inclusive innovation innovation ecosystem innovation environments responsible smart communities urban development
Region
Africa
Countries
Array
Institution
University of Tampere
Research Centre for Knowledge, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies (TaSTI)
Tampere, Finland
Funding instrument
Other, Ministry for Foreign Affairs (ICI, HEI-ICI, N-S-S), Business Finland
Head of research
Mika Kautonen
Research team
Mika Kautonen, Mika Raunio, Mika Nieminen, Veikko Ikonen, Virpi Oksman
Partners
University of Tampere, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd, Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST), University of Namibia (UNAM)
Contact information
Mika
+358 50 318 6116
mika.kautonen@tuni.fi
Open link
Record last updated
29.4.2019