We have entered in an exciting phase of our smart cities research and development initiative. We have been having a series of very productive and fruitful workshops with internal and external stakeholders to gather ideas, suggestions, and proposals from a wide variety of colleagues and partners (current and potential) for firming up the foundations and structure of our initiative. Last week (October 27), we organised a workshop involving more than a dozen participants from local councils and different agencies of the state department. The purpose of the workshop was to brainstorming and organise the ideas and needs of the councils/government that can be converted into researchable projects to support innovation and entrepreneurship in Adelaide in the area of Smart Cities. Our strong and ongoing collaboration with the Adelaide Smart Cities Studio was hugely helpful in an offer to host the event in one of the buildings of the council, next door to the Adelaide Smart City Studio, and the Studio’s manager Beth Worrall was extremely helpful and actively engaged in the workshop. We invited representatives from several councils
The attendance was impressive and the interest in the topics was intense. There was not sufficient time to cover everything. However, the breakout discussions produced dozens of insightful ideas that would be converted into concrete researchable ideas to be synthesising for producing 2-4 major projects with a strong interdisciplinary participation and potential venues for seeking funding. The workshop participants were briefed about the purpose of the workshop as we are exploring the potential and viability of starting a major new initiative on Smart Cities and we are looking into how to strengthen our existing partnerships in this area and bringing more partners on the Table. The participants of the workshop appreciated our efforts and showed genuine interest and enthusiasm to build something significant in the area in close collaboration with us. I am very much looking forward to the next move of this initiative that has came out of our initial effort on building a centre on Smart Cities.