The Creative City: An Innovative Digital Leadership Program for City Decision Makers

The Creative City: An Innovative Digital Leadership
            Program for City Decision Makers

                Christopher G. Kirwan1 ✉ , Dan Yao2, and Wanni Dong2
                                            (   )

                      1
                    Henley Business School, Reading RG6 6UD, UK
                      christopher.g.kirwan@gmail.com
                     2
                       Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
            yaod14@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn, dawn0311@gmail.com

        Abstract. As cities have become more advanced through the emergence of new
        technologies and Smart Cities solutions, there is a greater necessity to unlock the
        true potential of cities based not only on the technological dimensions, but on a
        more holistic approach incorporating strategies embodying design thinking,
        resource optimization, system integration and stakeholder engagement, enhanced
        via new technologies, fundamental to harnessing the creative potential of cities.
        This paper seeks to outline and define the key theoretical concepts and method‐
        ology of the Creative City Digital Leadership Program, a joint initiative between
        Tsinghua University’s Service Design Institute, Henley Business School’s Infor‐
        matics Lab and Parsons Institute for Information Mapping established to provide
        a new digital platform for training city leaders and managers seeking alternative
        approaches.

        Keywords: Digital leadership · Smart cities · Urban ecosystems · Resource
        optimization · System integration · Stakeholder engagement · Design thinking ·
        City DNA · Urban branding · Urban interface · User experience

1    Introduction

With a rapid urbanization across the developing countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle
East, and Latin America and a slower but continuing urban growth in the developed
world, 2.5 billion people worldwide are poised to become urban dwellers in the next
three decades. As populations swell, some of these cities will grow as great centers of
wealth creation while others are likely to fail due to the lack of a clear vision and devel‐
opment strategy [1]. The concentration of activity in cities has led to a fierce competition
to attract human capital and manage resources. In China alone, there are 300 cities
designated as pilot Smart Cities competing for government support, global resources,
and technology innovation. Each of these cities is seeking a unique identity and inno‐
vative strategy to attract new talent, improve quality of life and advance its position in
the national and international marketplace. In order to achieve these goals, a new breed
of digitally savvy city leaders and managers will be required to understand the potential
of new technologies and how these can unlock the value proposition of Creative Cities.

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
P.-L.P. Rau (Ed.): CCD 2016, LNCS 9741, pp. 540–550, 2016.
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40093-8_53

The Creative City: An Innovative Digital Leadership Program      541

2   The Creative City

2.1 Overview

As cities are now competing more than ever for global recognition, there is a need to
unlock the true potential of cities based on a more holistic approach incorporating strat‐
egies embodying design thinking, resource optimization, system integration and stake‐
holder engagement, enhanced via new technologies, fundamental to harnessing the
creative potential of cities. This issue is indeed one of the most challenging to define,
as it is a combination of hard and soft assets that make up the creative composition of
cities. This paper seeks to provide a brief overview of the notion of Creative Cities and
how through the process of defining the potential of each city, leaders and managers can
gain insight into the ways that Creative City methodology can be applied to their city;
to have an ultimate impact on the growth, quality of life and sustainability and to better
understand how new technologies can achieve these goals.

2.2 The Unique Identity of Cities – Macro

Throughout the world, cities have been competing on many levels to attract trade, labor
and other resources while at the same time defining their unique identities. The Creative
City is based on many factors that must be incorporated to establish a unique position
based on a combination of identity, positioning and resource allocation that each city
offers within local and global markets. The Creative City concept is based on the prin‐
ciple that in order for a city to reach its full potential, these elements must be identified
and optimized. These multi-facets are represented in The Cities of Opportunity 2015
Report published by PwC ranking cities based on multiple indices that provide a wide
spectrum of criteria to measure the success of cities. The report analyzes the trajectory
of 30 major cities, all capitals of finance, commerce, and culture through their current
performance criteria and what makes these cities function better [2]. As defined in the
PwC report, technology, intellectual capital and openness to the world through tele‐
communication access are some of the key drivers of the growth and prosperity of cities.
When defining the key drivers, technology quickly bridges to innovation and creativity.
    Today cities around the world are being revitalized through many different strategies.
For example, the regeneration of historical districts in Shanghai, government green
design policies in Berlin, and the re-branding of Florence, Italy to call attention to its
exceptional cultural legacy, efforts in each case that were planned to capitalize on the
unique consumer appeal of each destination. The Creative Cities concept can be used
to facilitate this renewal process by developing strategies that capture the inherent char‐
acteristics of a city or region, employing various strategies to channel these assets into
a comprehensive, integrated approach to reflect the city as a desirable place to live, work,
play and invest and to inform city leaders how to unlock the true potential of their city.
As part of this movement, many cities have finally realized the importance of soft
resources and have invested in the creation and development of major business and
cultural events in the form of expos, trade fairs, industry forums, film and fashion festi‐
vals, with each city looking to be differentiated in the global market by these venues.

542     C.G. Kirwan et al.

Cities around the world like London, Beijing and New York have established major
cultural events that have indeed created highly significant global recognition and
economic benefits.

2.3 Innovation Districts - Geographic
According to the Brookings paper “The Rise of Innovation Districts: A New Geography
of Innovation in America,” new districts are emerging, where “leading-edge anchor
institutions and companies cluster and connect with start-ups, business incubators and
accelerators.” Featured as “physically compact, transit-accessible, and technically-
wired,” these new urban zones as “innovative districts,” are supporting mixed-use
development and have been considered to be a new model for economic growth.
     At a time when stagnant growth, rising social inequality and increasing environ‐
mental degradation are posing great challenges to the cities, the emergence of innovation
districts can play a unique role in stimulating local economies by encouraging and facil‐
itating co-invention and co-production across sectors and disciplines, in reducing
inequality with its capacity to include more disadvantaged population in the growth, and
in rehabilitating the environment through more efficient and friendly use of land [3].
     Similar to industrial districts and suburban science parks, innovation districts are
also manifesting as well as changing the preferences of people and industry in current
technology driven activities, creating new models that connect the forging of economy,
the management of place, and the building of network [3].

2.4 Building Capacity and Improved Decision-Making – Integrated Approaches
    to Policy and Leadership

An integrated assessment for urban sustainability and development, as Dawson and
colleagues point out, is “much more than an exercise in modeling and data analysis.”
Rather, it must consider and connect both the hard and soft systems, focusing on the
interaction between and involvement of researchers and stakeholders. The integrated
approach distinguishes itself in its great emphasis on the “explicit and transparent”
reflection and learning process in urban planning and management [4].
    The first element of an integrated approach is to engage the end users in defining
policy questions and drivers, in order to set a practical goal and scope of the assessment.
In this way not only the relevance of research is justified in a policy context, but also
the decision makers will be inspired to engage in the process as it progresses, which is
“particularly important in an evolving policy landscape” [4]. Moreover, it is important
that the integrated assessment participates in a wider “dialogue,” an interaction with the
urban area, i.e., no matter being carefully designed or coincidently happened, the
approach can be a monitor and displayer of urban changes through its regular reviews
and updates.
    In addition to direct economic costs and benefits which are easier to capture, it is
also vital to employ a more complex and sophisticated approach in the evaluation of
long-term urban sustainability delivering, since issues such as amenity, social benefits,
political costs can hardly be measured in a tangible way. Therefore, “non-monetary

The Creative City: An Innovative Digital Leadership Program     543

approaches” must be considered and developed in mainstream decision-making and
methods such as multi-criteria analysis will help the decision makers understand the
impacts of different choices.

3   Theory and Methodology of Creative Cities - Digital Leadership

3.1 Purpose

The Creative City concept must define an innovative approach that optimizes the unique
identity and specific resources of each city. With the emergence of new Smart City
models currently being applied across major cities throughout the developed and devel‐
oping world, there has been an increased need to train city leaders about the complex
systems and strategies related to the innovative management of cities. The Creative City
Digital Leadership Program is a new initiative to fill this void by enabling city leaders
to be exposed to global best practices in the planning, design, implementation and oper‐
ation of a new generation of digitally based tools to optimize the functions of cities. The
ultimate purpose is to improve quality of life for its citizens, stimulate economic growth
while preserving and protecting the natural environment.
    However, innovation is an ambiguous word that can have many meanings and appli‐
cations as seen through the multifarious interpretations of the recent explosion of this
term applied to companies and cities. Innovation primarily derives from the technology
sector and has been a means to unlock potential at different scales from people, compa‐
nies, cities and nations. In some cases, Innovation has now been equated with the poten‐
tial of global economies as the primary driver of change and future growth. In the
knowledge economy, innovation is what underpins the creation and management of IP
linked to research and development of new technologies. In fact in some countries where
manufacturing has been replaced by the knowledge economy, as in the case with the
UK, innovation and the development of IP has become a critical part of the GDP and
may be one of the most defining factors in economic growth and sustainability.
    The Creative City concept builds on the unique drivers of each city to explore,
augment and perpetuate greater soft power in cities made possible by advancements in
new technologies, digital systems, media, big data and behavioral analytics including
smart cities and innovative approaches to city management. The Creative City meth‐
odology explores the key factors that allow cities to stimulate and support innovative in
order to unlock their creative potential. These elements can be in the form of important
research, pilot projects and the establishment of applications that provide the exploratory
functions to unearth potential innovation at different scales from community-based
projects to large-scale citywide development.

3.2 Methodology: Macro City DNA – Defining the Unique Strengths/Assets

Each city has its own unique DNA that combines geographic location, physical layout,
socio-demographic composition, cultural and physical resources, including workforce,
and industry sectors. Professor Michael Porter from Harvard University focuses on how
to optimize these resources to achieve competitive advantages [5, 6]. Building on

544      C.G. Kirwan et al.

Porter’s model, each city needs to understand its unique DNA to achieve its maximum
potential. The CITY DNA model allows cites to develop a strategy based on the creative
and cultural assets in order to identify a core DNA. From this base, a theoretical and
practical methodology can be developed that proposes a combination of City Branding,
Media Architecture and Cultural Programming to represent and express the unique DNA
of each city (Fig. 1).

               Fig. 1. Mapping the creative industries in China’s leading cities

    The Creative City Leadership Program builds on these elements to develop a training
program to help city leaders understand how to map and visualize a strategy that connects
physical and virtual urban systems from unique stakeholders’ points of view based on
the CITY DNA perspective. To partially illustrate this process of differentiation, a
comparative study was conducted by Kirwan/Fu Information Architecture class at
Tsinghua University to map the creative industries within leading cities in China with
the result of better understanding the competitive strengths of these cities.

3.3 Methodology: Design Thinking - Strategies for Broader Applications
Across multiple business lines, cities are now looking at new innovative models derived
from tech culture - body storming, hackathons, start-ups incubators - while simultane‐
ously introducing interdisciplinary approaches and borrowing methodologies from outside
fields including design where companies such as IDEO, FROG and others have brought a
more holistic approach to innovation. Design thinking plays a key role in establishing an
open source, iterative process that allows for ideas and collaboration to stimulate interdis‐
ciplinary solutions. This is due to the inherent nature of the design process to identify gaps
and propose comprehensive solutions. Unlike many other disciplines, design is able to
adapt itself to each context and to form a language inherently connected or drawn from that
unique combination of factors. Therefore, design thinking requires an open-ended approach
that the design process is capable of facilitating. Creative City Digital Leadership Program

The Creative City: An Innovative Digital Leadership Program     545

draws from the key strategies of Design thinking to unearth the potential concepts that can
define the programming of cities (Fig. 2).

                               Fig. 2. Design thinking tree

3.4 Methodology: The Practice of Convergence (Interdisciplinary Approach)

The convergence of design thinking, advanced computation and business innovation is
now at the core of new educational models and has led to the emergence of hybrid
professional fields and careers such as Information Architecture, User Experience, Data
Visualization and other new media related fields that have drawn from diverse areas of
knowledge and are now influencing the nature of how cities are rethinking their approach
[7]. The Creative City Digital Leadership Program develops a comprehensive planning
methodology that draws from the key strategies across different disciplines including
economics, urban planning, sustainable design, ecology, sociology and behavioral
sciences, computer programming, media and interactive design. This process examines
both macro and micro aspects and develops urban strategies to provide a broader
conceptual understanding of how and why these applications serve to enhance the expe‐
rience of cities [8].

3.5 Methodology: Collective Intelligence

The Creative City Digital Leadership Program utilizes theories and applications of
collective intelligence to visualize and model patterns and trends of cities [9]. Data
visualizations of the ‘urban pulse’ provide insights into urban behavior and lifestyle
trends to better understand how cities work, enabling city leaders to gain valuable
insights for the planning and design of their cities. A key aspect of the application of
collective intelligence is to create urban-scale, multi-sector datasets to deliver compre‐
hensive urban simulations [10]. By collecting data and visualizing information across

546       C.G. Kirwan et al.

multiple urban functions, it is possible to understand how the interdependencies of urban
functions, both physical and virtual, may be optimized through the planning and design
of innovative interventions to achieve the creative potential of cities.

3.6 Four Levels of the Creative City Digital Leadership Program Development
    Systems: Comparative analysis of urban systems and the relationship of physical and
    digital/media layers.
    Typologies: Codifying emerging typologies and patterns in urban systems by repre‐
    senting the hierarchy and components of the system.
    Navigation and Interface: Visualizing user experience of the system and how users
    dynamically interact within the system architecture including both physical digital
    realms.
    Interventions: Developing a comprehensive plan that identifies gaps in existing urban
    systems where there is a potential need for digital/smart solutions (Fig. 3).

                   Fig. 3. Creative city Digital Leadership Program matrix

4     The Creative City Innovation Alliance

Three institutes will form one new entity representing the new Creative Cities Innovation
Alliance that will serve as a collective think-tank as well as the founding contributors
of the Creative Cities Digital Leadership Program:

Service Design Institute, Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University. As a
new integrated discipline, service design combines theory and methodologies from
multiple fields bridging academia, industry and government to provide real solutions
and applications to the complex problems facing the advancement of our society,

The Creative City: An Innovative Digital Leadership Program     547

environment and the global economy. In order to achieve China’s vision to progress
from a nation of manufacturing to knowledge industry and to become a pioneer in design
and technology innovation, the Chinese government has initiated national plans based
on the integration of the IT industry with traditional industries and university-industry
collaborative innovation programs across China and linking to the world. Design and
the fusion of culture and technology are the core impetuses for this industry reform. The
role of the Service Design Institute at Tsinghua University is to develop innovation
models to promote and advance the new category of service design while stimulating
business innovation in China. Based on an international platform, collaborative format
and shared research, the Service Design Institute focuses on the creation, education,
promotion, and connection of a new Service Design framework. There are two new
opportunities in China for Service Design in the context of Smart Cities: “New Lifestyle
Design” and “Design for People” rethinking and redesigning the urban experience via
infrastructure, mobility, healthcare, retail, recreation, and to create new opportunities
for the private sector shaping the new lifestyle for today and future citizens.

Design Beijing Lab, Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University. Within the
Service Design Institute, Design Beijing Lab utilizes design thinking to actively develop
projects for the economic, social and environmental benefit of Beijing. The lab has
worked on many Smart City applications and has participated in Beijing Design Week
and Beijing Smart City Expo for the past 6 years bringing new ideas related to the
interface between humans, computer and cities. The lab functions as a platform for
research, planning, design and experimentation for new media applications. Multi-
disciplinary teams conduct analysis of urban activity in both the physical and the virtual
realms and the patterns of citizen interaction, providing valuable data for the identifi‐
cation of key trends and opportunities for new urban lifestyle applications. As a result,
cities, companies and individuals are enabled to better adapt and improve, creating
solutions for the public future wellbeing and quality of life.

Henley Business School Informatics Research Center. Part of Henley Business
School at the University of Reading, the Informatics Research Center (IRC) provides a
center for interdisciplinary and collaborative research in Informatics. Benefiting from
input of knowledge and expertise from various subject fields, including Biodiversity,
Business Management, Economics, Information acquisition and assimilation, Intelligent
Pervasive Spaces, Computer Science, Cognitive Science and Systems Engineering,
across a number of Schools and beyond, the IRC aims to construct digital infrastructures
for innovations in domains of business and management, IT for strategic management,
enterprise information systems, financial modeling and prognostics, bio-computing,
construction management, intelligent buildings, pervasive intelligent spaces, and IT
supported collaborative work. The role of digital infrastructures construction is to boost
ICT capacities for both decision-makers and the city operation systems, facilitating the
implementation of creative city plans [11].

Digital Leadership Program – Henley Business School, University of Reading.
While the development of digital technologies such as social media, mobility, analytics,
cloud computing and the Internet of Things are creating innovation opportunities and

548     C.G. Kirwan et al.

competitive advantage for cities that embrace it, challenge is also posed to the efficient
and effective operation of a much more complex urban systems, requiring a new gener‐
ation of digital leaders who can critically think about the ways in which digital tech‐
nologies can be utilized, to creatively manage the resources and to coordinate among
the stakeholders. As a collaborative network platform set up by Henley Business School,
the Digital Leadership Program aims to close the gap between supply and demand of
digital leadership skills required in driving business and public sector innovations [12].
Incorporating a series of research and knowledge transfer projects, the program is
designed to explore the strategic role of leadership in the digital economy, to exchange
research findings, practices, policies and programs in digital leadership, and to enhance
leaders’ competencies in technology-enabled decision-making.

Parsons MFA in Design and Technology. Today’s designer faces two fundamental
challenges: the expanding influence of design within society and the growing role of
technology within design. The MFA in Design and Technology (MFA DT) provides
students with a lively and dynamic environment in which to use design research, process,
applied theory, and writing to address these challenges. Students push their experimen‐
tation beyond the visual: Design is seen as a mechanism for developing strategies,
knowledge organization, business structures, and social consciousness. Areas of study
include Interaction (mobile, games, Web, and installation), Physical Computing
(programming code and chip-based applications such as toys, fashion, media in archi‐
tecture, and performance technology), 2D and 3D Animation, Motion Graphics, and
Digital Filmmaking.

Parsons Institute for Information Mapping. Parsons Institute for Information
Mapping (PIIM) is a Research, Development and Professional facility within The New
School and located in New York City. PIIM’s mission is to advance the field of Knowl‐
edge Visualization through academic and commercial pursuits. PIIM researchers and
staff disseminate their expertise in information categorization, knowledge representa‐
tion, information taxonomy development, information logic and ranking/scoring,
knowledge visualization, and Graphic User Interface (GUI) and User Experience Design
(UXD) by developing powerful tools and methods for decision makers and analysts.
PIIM’s work seeks to increase decision maker and analyst cognition of complex data
sets via efficient experiences and visualizations. In both its own research and in its
engagements with government agencies, corporations and other organizations, PIIM
pushes the boundaries of information, engineering and visual design to develop new
ways of thinking about information — and to build and deliver corresponding real world
solutions [13].

5     The Creative City Research Projects

Creative Cities Innovation Alliance incubates academic research and projects that
support the development of cities as centers of innovation. An example of a past project
from Prof. Fu/Kirwan at Tsinghua University’s Design Beijing Lab includes InnoZone,
part of Beijing Smart City Expo (Fig. 4).

The Creative City: An Innovative Digital Leadership Program       549

                                 Fig. 4. InnoZone interface

InnoZone. Innozone data mines and visualizes patterns of innovation in the city - an
interactive visualization project aimed at users that want to enhance their understanding
and ability to engage in cultural activities within the city based on their individual profile
and personal interests. By sourcing all types of activities in Beijing via the Internet, both
men and women and people at different stages of life can pursue self-realization and life
long learning by identifying and participating in appropriate activities including lectures,
exhibitions and salons based on geographic location and accessibility. In addition to
serving individual users, the InnoZone system, built using Arduino, mines and compo‐
sites data collected over time and maps this information on a central citywide visuali‐
zation illustrating emerging patterns of cultural activity within Beijing. The project was
debuted at during Beijing Design Week’s Smart City Expo.

6   Conclusion

The Creative City Innovation Alliance, with participants: Tsinghua University, Henley
Business School and Parsons/New School University, has been formed to create a global
partnership with the goal of training city leaders in identifying the unique cultural
resources of their cities and finding ways to unleash their potential as Centers of Inno‐
vation. By establishing research bases in Beijing, London and New York, this alliance
will take advantage of being situated in the leading centers of growth, technological
advancement and mega-trends.
    The Alliance plans to offer the Creative City Digital Leadership Program, an online
platform combining executive education training modules and a digital dashboard for

550      C.G. Kirwan et al.

city leaders supplemented with on-location workshops in Beijing, London/Reading and
New York utilizing the highly experienced personnel and unique resources at each
university to assist participating city leaders in creating the necessary framework for
Innovation Districts and to train them in using the latest digital technologies in the plan‐
ning and management of their communities.

Acknowledgments. We are pleased to recognize contributions to this paper made by the
following colleagues: Academic Research and Collaboration – Prof. Zhiyong Fu, Academy of
Arts and Design and co-founder of Design Beijing Lab, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China;
Sven Travis, Faculty Parsons School of Design, New York, USA; Prof. Kecheng Liu, Dr. Weizi
Li, Henley Business School, University of Reading, England; Dr. Biyu Wan, National Smart City
Joint Lab, Beijing, China. Design Beijing Lab, School of Art and Design Tsinghua University
Student Projects: InnoZone – Yiming Wei, Xue Dong and Shukai Wang, Beijing, China. Editorial
Support – Ernest E. Kirwan, AIA, retired architect/planner and faculty member, Harvard Graduate
School of Design, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

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