Urban Manufacturing - Stimulating Innovation Through Collaborative Maker Spaces
The common challenge of Urban Manufacturing is to better support and develop a particular type of innovation infrastructure: collaborative maker spaces. These spaces are characterised as places where people from different disciplines work together to produce new products and services, and have sprung up throughout cities and regions. Examples include Fab Labs, Living Labs, Open Innovation Centres and Cross-Sector Incubators. However, such facilities often struggle to maximise their impact, due to issues such as segregated ecosystems, poor governance and challenging business/financial models.

The overall objective of Urban Manufacturing is to ensure that these spaces thrive. This will be achieved through identifying good practices in Urban Manufacturing, improving the related policy instruments in partner city/regions, and monitoring the effects. The partnership has identified three specific development themes: 1) collaborative incubation (particularly where Arts combine with STEM); 2) investment in collaborative R&D; 3) commercialisation of collaborative innovation. Each theme has a grouping of cities/regions, who share that interest and will work together to make improvements through an iterative process of exchange of experience, peer review and action plan writing.

The expected changes are: an increase in the amount of ESIF funding for collaborative innovation; an increase in the number of enterprises engaging with collaborative maker spaces; greater integration for innovation infrastructure; and indicators to measure the impact of policies, ensuring sustainability.

The main outputs of the project will be 24+ Good Practices; 14 Study Visits; 8 Policy Clinics; 13 Peer Review Sessions; 8 Local Stakeholder Groups; and 8 city/region Action Plans. These will be delivered alongside a comprehensive programme of dissemination.                  

The beneficiaries of the project will include innovation actors, policy makers, enterprises, cluster managers and Fab Labs.