An innovation landscape defines the city context and how it responds to affect its’ innovation management capacity. As a city is a key enabler in the process of making a city smarter, district by district, it is essential for a city to work on innovation management.

The IRIS project looked at how to measure the innovation ecosystem performance of its own cities – analysing the Technical Innovation System and entrepreneurial ecosystem of a city in collaboration with the University of Nice and the Utrecht University.

Their research generates spider graphs, showing areas where a city is strong and areas where the city needs to make improvements if the ambition is to create a more innovative eco-system.

To get a deeper understanding of how a city is constructed to handle innovation management, IMCG International also interviewed the IRIS city authorities, using a set of questions, influenced by the IMProve method. The discussions focused on innovation strategy, innovation culture, factors enabling innovation etc.