Abstract
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Considering the way of implementing new solutions, in recent years we can see a trend to emphasize the importance of cooperation between various entities. From the perspective of public management, we can refer to public governance (e.g. Hausner 2008), and according to the innovation policy, we can talk about the concept of social innovation (e.g. Murray, Caulier-Grice, Mulgan 2010, BEPA 2011), or collaborative innovation (see Torfing 2016). In the case of enterprises, this may mean developing and testing new ideas in the living lab formula, where the importance of users' participation in introducing goods to the market is stressed. We can apply some analogy in solving urban problems. However, in such a case, we are talking about a public purpose, where the city's decision makers are the primary decision-makers, and co-decisioners are: citizens (city users), companies, scientific units and intermediaries. There is no single term for distinguishing the processes described in the joint resolution of urban problems from solving business problems. The terms urban living lab, urban lab, or city lab are used here (see e.g. Scholl and Kemp 2016, Voytenko Palgan et al. 2016). City lab is considered as a specific platform to implement urban innovation. As with living labs, these are real-life applications of open innovation, where the importance of experimentation involving users, co-design and learning is underlined (Urb @ exp initiative: http://www.urbanexp.eu; access: November 2018). It is therefore a specific type of lab, where the initiator of the activities and their relevant participants are the city authorities with the characteristics of the experimentation and the users involvement (Scholl and Kemp 2016). Public authorities play a special role in city lab: they are often the initiators of such a platform as well as and participants looking after the criterion of legality and the reality of the developed solutions. The question then arises: is the idea of the city lab in line with the assumptions underlying the concepts of 'lab family' (such as living lab), where innovators have unlimited possibilities of proposing and improving new solutions? Or maybe, after the period of defining the importance of urban movements, city lab means return to emphasizing the significance of representative democracy in urban areas? And finally, whether after a period of emphasizing the importance of public governance/ multi-level governance, is this a return to some kind of Weberian approach to management of public affairs (neo-Weberian state)?
Seeking answers to the above questions, this article presents the understanding of city lab, and also indicates the actors, which are: city authorities, citizens (or city users), entrepreneurs, scientific units and intermediaries. The emphasis has been placed on the description of the roles of public authorities. Next, based on the features of coordination mechanisms (hierarchical model of ideal bureaucracy, New Public Management, and, in particular, multi-level governance and neo-Weberian state), it was analysed which of these modes of governance most accurately reflects the management of the city lab.
The article presents a theoretical perspective as well as reference to case studies.
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