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Urban Innovators Global drives the betterment of cities. It excels at delivering on Innovation Capacity for Cities to further that larger goal. Urban Innovators Global helps cities expand their capacity to innovate by means of skills development, talent outsourcing, innovation program management, digital transformation assessments and advisory. Last but not least, UI Global builds ventures on top of urban problems, needs and opportunities – a unique venture-build program in part enabled by investors tied to our organization and community.
UI Global is a young organization, but the expertise and experience is not. The UI Global community is a unique and growing group of urban innovation experts from across the world and across disciplines.
UI Global has been set up as a group of advisors, builders, educators and entrepreneurs – not as a consultancy. We aim to support our customers by means of longer term engagements, building the actual capacity to innovate for and with cities and their many partners. We avoid consultancy reports and long PowerPoints, we aim for tangible innovations with tangible output.
Urban Innovators Global was founded by Bas Boorsma, Rijn Platteel and Raffaele Gareri and is powered by the UI Global community of professionals.
Our urban habitats face unprecedented challenges and opportunities amidst an unfolding fourth Industrial Revolution while having to mitigate climate change and manage system shifts powered by digitalization and the energy transition.
To get innovation right, however, we need to learn from 20+ years of ‘smart city’ innovation – as well as of the urban innovation practices of more distant chapters of the past. Too many ‘smart city’ efforts of the past have resulted in meagre output and have often been too tech-centric and ahistoric, generating issues that would have the 20th century Urbanist Jane Jacobs blush.
The cities of today bear a diversified pattern of local urban challenges that force the one-size-fits-all paradigms to become obsolete. A localized approach to urban problem-solving can become the catalyst of context-rich innovation across all things urban and create a set of livable habitats for generations to come.
The good news is: these lessons are being learned, and can be applied. Digital and analogue fundamentals of relevance to urban life are finally converging. System-wide, interdisciplinary innovations is what we aim for. The time is now. In many ways, we are collectively already late. But as an African saying goes: the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, while the second best time is now.
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