Open Source Cities spoke with Sascha Haselmayer, General Director and Co-Founder of Living Labs Global about the Living Labs Global Award and incentivizing service innovation in cities through competitions and open source citizen engagement.

Background
The Living Labs Global Award is open for submissions until February 17, 2012. The awards ceremony will be held in Rio de Janeiro in conjunction with the Rio Summit on Service Innovation in Cities.

The Living Labs Global Award is very impressive and ambitious in scope, with a large number of countries included in the program. How did Living Labs Global develop the format and concept for the competition?

In 2008 we put the first Showcase online – 35 solutions that could help cities, since there seemed to be no other resource. Thousands of users from around the world were accessing this simple catalogue. At the same time, our work in Living Labs Global focused on helping high impact technologies spread across cities and we found the same disconnect over-and-over: cities do not announce their problems, and as a result innovative businesses do not find the market with the right need among the 557,000 communities around the world.

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