22/3/2019 Smart Cities, Intelligent Homes, And The Pursuit Of Innovation - Disruption Hub
Posted 1 day ago by ‒ Sarah Finch
Staff Writer & Content Editor
Smart Cities, Intelligent Homes, And The Pursuit
Of Innovation
Youth driven innovation and the city of the future
Henk Korevaar, founder of F-fectis and facilitator of innovation, shared with D/SRUPTION
his thoughts on harnessing the creativity of young people to create impactful change, and
how we can improve our built environments.
At the time of the Brexit referendum, an interesting debate was raised about who has the right to
make decisions about their country. Is it older generations, many of whom would not live through
the consequences of the choice they made? Or young people – 15, 16 and 17 year olds – whose
lives would be irrevocably shaped by the vote, but who were not given the chance to have their
say?
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22/3/2019 Smart Cities, Intelligent Homes, And The Pursuit Of Innovation - Disruption Hub
The same point applies to innovation projects, particularly in large scale, urban developments
and so called ‘smart’, ‘intelligent’ or ‘connected’ cities. If these projects truly want to serve the
needs of future citizens, there is a strong argument for making them part of the process. Youth
driven innovation
Korevaar has been facilitating innovation and helping people to come up with new ideas since
the 1980s. When it comes to creating innovative projects – including the much touted ‘smart’
designs for cities and infrastructure – he makes no claims to expertise. What he does do is bring
people together. This involves helping organisations to make the best use of their knowledge,
often with an injection of youthful energy.
“What I have been focusing on over the last two decades,” he says, “is what I call youth driven
innovation. For example, I recently hosted a week long programme with a UK based housing
association, their young professionals and a group of students from the University of East Anglia.
We provided all of them with a number of challenging statements on Monday morning and saw
what kind of innovative ideas they came up with by Friday afternoon.”
“During that week we provided them with all kinds of input, inspiration and ways of working to get
their train of thought going. We want the students to present us with ideas that people that work
within the organisation may themselves have never come up with because they may be a little bit
narrow focused, or too biased, or too filled with the history of their own company.”
Sidewalk Toronto
Seeking answers from students is a major aspect of another project that Korevaar is involved in –
Sidewalk Toronto. A Canadian government initiative in partnership with Alphabet’s Sidewalk
Labs, the project represents the full regeneration of the Eastern Waterside in Toronto. With
around 800 acres of land to transform, this is one of North America’s largest underdeveloped
urban areas.
“What I like about the Sidewalk project,” says Korevaar, “is the fact that from the onset, they
started the project with the involvement of young people in the city area. They challenged those
people – who may well be potential future residents – to come up with as many ideas as
possible, for the whole area and its infrastructure. Things like heated sidewalks, systems for
garbage disposal, intelligent lighting, heating systems, sensing air quality or noise… So in their
laboratory and visitor centre they’ve got all kinds of examples that they’ve collected regarding a
lot of different aspects, things that you could focus on if you started building a city from scratch.”
Technology and our homes
Drawing down to the level of individual buildings, current demographic and lifestyle changes
place clear demands on the design of our homes. With people in the developed world living
longer, houses must be designed to support the independence of elderly residents. This is one
area where technology and innovative design solutions can provide a helping hand.
“One of the focus points for our future homes,” says Korevaar, “is how technology can enable
people that are getting older to live longer in the comfort of their own home. Many years ago,
they would have gone to some sort of care institute. Now people want to stay and live in their
own house.”
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“What I’m working on with students and young professionals is to come up with all kinds of
innovative ideas for the elderly that could be implemented in innovative houses. For instance,
things that can be built or installed in a home when it is renovated and that can be switched on if
needed. So you’d have a house full of sensors and other techniques and technologies. But, if
you’re younger, maybe only 25 per cent of all these functionalities will be turned on. Then the
older you get, the more functionalities will be switched on so that your house enables you to stay
there and live in a safe and secure environment.”
According to Korevaar, housing associations in the Netherlands are now considering these kinds
of ideas. With integrated sensor technology, houses themselves could monitor the behaviour of
their residents. Any deviations from normal patterns – such as failing to move for long periods of
time – could trigger automatic alerts to family, friends or caregivers that something may be
wrong. Although this raises pertinent questions around privacy, it is easy to see how such
technology could help the elderly live in their own homes for longer – and at a much lower cost
than our current solutions.
An innovator’s dilemma: what do we want?
When considering new innovations and technologies for people’s homes, city infrastructures and
urban areas in general, it can be difficult knowing which options to choose. The same applies to
the wider business environment, where both business to consumer and business to business
organisations have to decide how to optimise their offerings. Companies don’t always know
which courses of action will work best, and working out what clients want can be a difficult task…
For Korevaar, attempting to give people what they want is not always the right way to approach
innovation. This is because while we might know that we want things to work in a different way,
or to ‘be better’, we don’t always know what that looks like.
“In many instances,” he says, “people don’t know exactly what they want. I didn’t know I wanted
a smartphone 25 years ago, and if Apple had invited me over and said, ‘Okay Henk, what is it
that you want?’ I’m sure that I would not have mentioned an iPhone.”
“So in my innovation projects and in my facilitation, I challenge people to come up with things
that they want to improve or things that they don’t want, instead of coming up with completely
new ideas for systems or technologies that they would like to have in their built environment 20
years from now. There are very few people who can come up with those ideas. If they are there,
I’m very interested in meeting them…”
Brave enough to fail
Very few people, then, have the vision to conceive fully formed, revolutionary ideas in flashes of
genius. As a result, it may be better for us to think of disruption as an incremental process. To
ask ourselves how certain aspects of a design could be improved, and what innovations –
technological or otherwise – could help to achieve this.
Crucial to this rather more modest take on innovation is giving equal weight to those ideas and
projects which did not work out. Working with a large group of housing associations and students
in the Netherlands, one of Korevaar’s current projects aims to take a very frank and supportive
look at failure.
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“Nobody’s eager to tell you what went wrong,” he says, “everybody’s always interested in their
success stories. But maybe we can learn even more from why things did go wrong or why people
didn’t use some technology or some functionality that you thought was fantastic.”
“We want to make sure that people share their successes and failures with us, so during the
project it is important to treat them well and to create a trustworthy environment.”
Measuring the impact
One aspect of dissecting the success or failure of innovation projects revolves around metrics –
the way you measure your results. For Korevaar, this should never come down to economic
factors alone, as it is equally important to consider how innovation impacts upon the people it
was designed for.
“That’s why my company is called F-fectis,” he notes. “Effect is the Dutch word for impact. I’m not
that interested in the final result of a project being a building or a street that has been created.
That’s the job and responsibility of the project manager and the project team. I’m much more
interested in the impact that a completed project has on the community or on its inhabitants.”
Unfortunately, too often projects fail to deliver on their objectives, and demonstrate that positive
change has been made. Korevaar cites the common practice of adding more lanes to road
systems to reduce traffic jams, without finding out if the finished result has really made a
difference.
“Once the project is finished nobody measures the length of the traffic jams any longer – they are
just happy with X kilometres of extra asphalt. Nobody bothers trying to find out if it really
diminished the time that people spent travelling from A to B. And in the Netherlands most of the
time the lesson is, it didn’t.”
“It’s the same with housing associations. They spend a lot of money on a variety of IT systems
and IT based solutions, and maybe sometimes they identify why they do it in terms of being
better, faster, cheaper, and more economic. But in the end when the project’s finished, nobody is
measuring it.”
Underpinning even the grandest of innovations, then, it is important to consider the tangible
impact of the changes that are made. This forces urban developers to take a hard look at their
projects, even if they will bring much needed money and regeneration to an area.
“If you’re building new infrastructures in new areas, that’s great,” says Korevaar. “But my focus is
‘Okay, how does that for instance improve the safety in your environment?’ The reply might be,
‘well, we didn’t measure safety when we started it, but now that we have intelligent lighting, we
are positive that safety in that area has improved.’ I say, ‘Great. Can you prove that?’ The
answer? ‘No, no we can’t, but we think it has’.”
“I hope and expect that’s exactly my contribution, when I’m involved in a project,” Korevaar adds,
“it is to keep on hammering on… To say I understand what you mean when you say it’s finished –
that we started using it or started obtaining the benefits from it… But please identify to me what
those benefits are so that you can explain to me how successful your innovation is.”
The kids are all right
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22/3/2019 Smart Cities, Intelligent Homes, And The Pursuit Of Innovation - Disruption Hub
When it comes to innovation, Korevaar’s support for young people stems not only from their
future as prospective consumers whose needs should be met, but also from their ability to think
creatively and to produce unfiltered ideas.
“There are a number of skills that we are sure young people have automatically after they’re
born,” he says, “and that the education system gradually kicks out of them, like creativity, playing,
visualising, collaborating.”
“We need to make sure that future generations keep hold of those creative skills that are needed
to become successful, innovative people. At the moment we have to put a lot of time and energy
into making older people innovative because they’ve unlearned to be creative and to be
enthusiastic – to jump in the air, to play act and to do all the things that young people are able to
do when you challenge them to pitch their idea.”
Moving forward, the education system may have to adapt if we are to secure the problem solvers
of tomorrow. But businesses face these issues too. How can they cultivate and inspire
innovation? As Korevaar’s experience shows, creating people focussed projects, a culture of
openness, and the freedom to fail is no bad place to start.
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