Abstract
Over the past years, a growing number of local initiatives are generating solutions for societal challenges in their cities. However, the scale and complexity of these challenges force urban innovators to constantly adapt and learn, having to acquire new capabilities that will help them advance towards systemic change. In the current work, we take the premise that these urban innovators need to be able to utilise the urban context as a learning ecosystem in order to push their interventions beyond the boundaries of small innovative niches. In keeping with Schön’s reflective practice, we envisage reflection as a core competence for these urban change makers to grow and present a reflective process supporting urban innovators in framing their professional learning journey to succeed in their projects. A series of online sessions have been conducted to investigate how to scaffold a reflective process enabling innovators to better identify challenges in their projects and the corresponding capabilities they need to acquire. In the proposed paper, we present reflective activities as a tool supporting urban innovators in self-defining their learning journeys and elaborate on the insights gained. It can be concluded that the reflective process we developed was valuable to urban innovators in unveiling new learning needs for their projects, while further research is needed to more effectively translate these learnings into actionable steps to sustain innovators’ self-development.
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Acknowledgements
The current study is part of the project DESIGNSCAPES (Building Capacity for Design-enabled Innovation in Urban Environments) funded by the Horizon2020 call CO-CREATION-02-2016—User-driven innovation: value creation through design-enabled innovation, under Grant Agreement No. 763784. The authors would like to thank the selected initiatives from the 2nd Open Call for Prototypes in the DESIGNSCAPES project for their participation in the study. Moreover, the support and fruitful discussions among the partners of the DESIGNSCAPES consortium are gratefully acknowledged.
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Magni, A., Calderón González, A., Mulder, I. (2022). Supporting Urban Innovators’ Reflective Practice. In: Mealha, Ó., Dascalu, M., Di Mascio, T. (eds) Ludic, Co-design and Tools Supporting Smart Learning Ecosystems and Smart Education. Smart Innovation, Systems and Technologies, vol 249. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3930-2_2
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