Urban Living Lab (Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines)
The Urban Living Lab – Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines aims to share knowledge and feedbacks experiences relating to territories innovation strategies and their implementation modalities. Our Living Lab will support innovation between living labs common themes through the development of European and International programs and develop joint actions in order to propose new standards or changes in European and National legislations, and create a framework for the development of an innovation ecosystem within the territories. Urban Living lab will support the development of best practices and communities in the areas of energy efficiency and urban planning for low carbon cities and also a better quality of life.
Description
Urban lab is located in the heart of a « new » city, Saint Quentin en Yvelines and in the heart of an historical city, Versailles, in the South West of the « Ile de France » region (Yvelines Department - 2 300 km ² and 1,400,000 inhabitants). Urban lab has developed an ecosystem of innovation involving students, residents, local communities, associations, and companies. It supports the development of ecodistricts and new innovative sectors, in relation with alively and low carbon city. This approach is relayed through the Climate-KIC (EIT), French poles of competitiveness , various European programs (e.g internet future PPP, Smartcities, CIP Eco-innovation, Interreg, FP7…), through the development of demonstrators and partnerships
The living lab is an open innovation ecosystem considering the territory in its cultural and educational dimension. Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (SQY) is labeled "city of art and history", "Health City" (by the World Health Organization) and "Digital city" (Label of the European network of digital cities). Versailles is a major historical city with the Palace of Versailles, but has also an important heritage of technical and technological knowledge on urban ecological engineering (association called ' life and the city") and industrial sectors such as aeronautics. The deployment of a fine mesh optical fibre network connected to a high speed digital backbone allows Versailles Grand Parc to propose conditions of development and innovation.. The agglomeration is currently developing new structuring tools in the perspective of the urban Living lab:
- the Versailles Grand Parc business incubator will open in January 2012. It will be composed of 58 cells, hosting new activities in relation with the competitiveness poles focus.
- the establishment of a demonstrator of innovative and virtuous practices of the « life and the city » business incubator ( located in the « Pion » neighborhood in Versailles),
- the future site of Satory which could become the experimental site of the new uses of low carbon transports: electrical vehicle trains, smart city improved traffic.
Urban lab mainly focuses on innovations in the fields of energy efficiency, mobility, food and training. In the future, Urban living lab is designed to develop itself in the fields of telemedicine, human services through the Institut de Promotion de la Santé, based in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (i.e institute for Health promotion).
References and Track Record
The Urban Living Lab is a joint initiative of Fondaterra - European Foundation for Sustainable Territories - , the Communauté D'Agglomération de Saint-Quentin-En-Yvelines, the Communauté D'Agglomération de Versailles Grand Parc and the Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin-En-Yvelines, implicating major actors of the territories : the university of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, the Maison des Sciences de l'Environnement et du Développement, the Maison de l'Emploi , the Maison de l'entreprise, l'Institut de Promotion de la Santé, the cluster "le Vivant et la Ville" and the business incubator "Versailles Grand Parc" which represent a huge potential of construction of a strong innovation ecosystem to gather student, teacher / searcher, entreprise, citizen and territories. Our initiative is supported by several higher research and education instituts, major companies, small companies and company cluster, NGO and associations.
Urban living lab favors open innovation, supporting the co-construction with the community of actors described previously, and sustaining collective intelligence. The issue of intellectual property is treated specifically, depending on the types of products and services developed by the living lab. Similarly, the development of technologies allowing to identify or locate objects and people requires to regulate specifically these technologies and the data processing associated when the « data protection act » is to be applied. The living lab accompanies service innovations based on data mining on legal aspects. Projects focus more generally on the development of new business models in the short or medium term.
Financing schemes of the Living Lab are based on public / private partnerships covering research funding, funding demonstrators directed to the launch on the market, but also based on sponsorship to support calls for proposals / calls for ideas, allowing the achievement of a "proof of concept”.
