Living Lab “Merchant, neighbour, living city”

Goals
To create an Innovation Living Lab addressed to creating solutions, methodologies and initiatives to re-stimulate local trade by incorporating new technologies and new ways of managerial organization associated to them.

Motivation
The local trade is a fundamental cornerstone, not only for every city's or metropolitan area’s economic activity, but it is also the most important social agglutination. The decadence of the small and medium neighbourhood trade is a double problem: On one hand, an economic problem, because it destroys growth forces, and on the other hand, because it eliminates social contact and congregation clusters, as well as the first door of the independent economic activity for minorities and immigrants.

The basic component of the social and economic relationship that contributes to the 2.0 technologies and, in general, the cooperative technologies, can be articulated as an axis of empowerment of the local small trades. Creating a network among them to create new services better adapted to their closest neighbours and exploiting the so-called hyperlocal dimension, the local trade has a possible future. This happens by developing the concept of a hyperlocal trade network, organized to detect and personalize offers and to anticipate services. To reach this goal, the simplest technologies, like Bluetooth and sensors, presence detection, and other technologies that could integrate cooperative resources and dispersed systems of information with tools and systems capable of creating adaptable offers and to share them to reduce costs, will be joined.

Different levels will be explored:

  • Infrastructure: Distributed sensors networks, mesh net, mobile devices integration.
  • Cooperative software: for coordinated management of offers.
  • Recommendation software: to adapt offers and anticipate tendencies.
  • Technological and organizational training in local business.

Specific characteristics:
We would work with small merchants, selected according to proximity. A test environment will be created and we would work cooperatively with the different merchants and users.