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Open innovation in urban energy systems

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Abstract

Despite recent efforts, existing urban energy systems still hardly meet the demands of sustainable development or climate change. Meeting these targets thus will require innovations that use energy much more efficiently and emit far less greenhouse gases. These innovations need to be made on the production as well as the consumption side, on all levels, and need to cover not only technical aspects, but even more service solutions. While many of these solutions still need to be developed, some are already invented but only exist in limited market segments. Opening closed urban planning processes and using open innovation tools can foster bottom-up urban energy system transformation by addressing the interactive ways of decision-making integrating company representatives and citizens. While open innovation tools like (open) innovation workshops or ideas competitions are already used by several companies to find and develop new designs and products, there is yet little experience with energy efficiency ideas and bottom-up changes. Therefore, we analyse energy-efficient ideas generated in three different ideas competitions. We discuss the findings for theory and research on open innovation approaches and bottom-up urban changes. Our results show that there are a vast number of ideas available in the public. Open innovation tools offer advanced possibilities to generate energy-efficient solutions.

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Acknowledgements

The OFFIES 2020+ and the User Integration projects have been generously funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research. OFFIES 2020+ was part of the research initiative ‘Fundamental Research Energy 2020+’, while User Integration received funding from the programme on ‘Social–Ecological Research’.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technische Universität München, TUM School of Management, Freising, Germany

    Marlen Arnold

  2. Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Ecological Economics, Oldenburg, Germany

    Volker Barth

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  1. Marlen Arnold
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  2. Volker Barth
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Correspondence to Marlen Arnold.

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Arnold, M., Barth, V. Open innovation in urban energy systems. Energy Efficiency 5, 351–364 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-011-9142-6

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