Innovation architecture of renewable energy solutions pilots in Oulu: InnoCity project case study

Innovation in urban environments has become increasingly important as many of the great challenges of our societies are underpinned by dynamics in urban surroundings. The challenge with innovations in urban environments is that many of them do not diffuse easily. This is typically due to the nature of urban innovations: they comprise complex entities consisting services, technologies, physical assets, and social practices - all these linking together a heterogeneous set of actors. Many types of partnerships between firms, authorities, and other actors are often needed. This report introduces and concentrates on one particular case project Renewable Energy Solutions in City Areas (RESCA). The project was located in the city of Oulu in Northern Finland. RESCA attempts to generate reasoned and reliable concepts to guide and help builders, developers and planners in choosing and combining renewable energy sources for single-family homes. Adopted solutions and concepts had to be simple to use, effective and they needed to be applicable to be used in the Building Supervision Office's quality guidance process. Additionally, concepts needed to be applicable in other cities as well. The objectives of this report are to identify the challenges related to urban innovation processes and their scaling-up, using RESCA project as an empirical case. In addition, the aim is to find the key points where innovations actually took or could have taken place. Findings implicate that one of the most important hotspot was the role and attitude of the local building administration when they acknowledged that the national building code standard did not offer the quality level or the functionalities that were aspired by the local building administration and supplied already by the market as ready-to-used applications or technologies. The other hot-spot was that the administration quite genuinely allowed market actors (suppliers) to take steps and present their ideas, and furthermore, to actually realise these ideas without any risk that administrational or regulatory standards could be made to work against these ideas.