Cities Forum 2025 - Cities as enablers of innovation: Unlock your potential

EUI and URBACT highlighted the opportunities offered for innovation transfer emphasising that cities are not alone and that transfer of knowledge can save time, money and energy.  Only a small proportion of the audience had previous experience of innovation transfer so participants were keen to hear the project leaders described their innovative solutions and note that innovation can come in many forms such as technological innovation, governance or process-led innovation. The opportunity to develop untested ways of working was emphasised, such as Turku’s implementation of the first “Urban Biodiversity Park” in Europe or EPIU’s approach to the use of data to tackle energy poverty.

Transfer Partners welcomed the prospect of replicating already tested solutions using this as an opportunity to kick-start a process of change in their city.

Pushpa Arabindoo highlighted flexibility and responsibility when testing innovative solutions and that there is no innovation without failure. Innovation does not have to be revolutionary but can be incremental and evolutionary over time.

The main takeaways from the session include:

• EUI Transfer is also beneficial for MUAs: the benefits for the transfer partners were well explained but it was also clear that the MUAs benefit from this external view, learning from their transfer partners and understanding better how and why they are doing certain activities.
• Exchange and Learning goes beyond the theme of the project: the cities present in the session explained the importance of sharing experience and the interesting spin offs that come from being part of an innovation transfer activity.
• Capacity building and Strong political leadership: participants were asked to express their views on what is needed for innovation transfer in cities. The full results are below but the importance of capacity building and leadership were highlighted.

At the end of the session, participants were asked if they would be interested in future URBACT and EUI opportunities, the response was overwhelmingly positive, with the majority responding positively. It may be useful to follow up with the participants to support them with any issues they are facing.  If there are opportunities with URBACT Transfer networks or Innovative Actions these can be shared proactively. Other EUI activities like city to city exchange are also interesting for the participants in this session.

The session was not thematic so there were limited inputs related the EU agenda for cities. The importance of exchange of experience and transfer of good practice in future EU initiatives was however clearly expressed by participants with more than half the audience expressing the need for capacity building for cities to support innovation.