Cluj-Napoca Project: using digital tools to storm the innovative potential of public employees

The first Internal meeting of the Cluj Innovation and Civic Imagination Centre was thus organised for the employees of Cluj-Napoca City Hall in the beginning of 2020.

Due to the overlap of the two qualities (that of being a citizen and also an expert in public services) the Mayor's office employees have a high potential for social innovation.

“We are initiating the first internal call for innovation proposals from a Romanian public administration, using a digital tool - an internal access platform called Innovato-R and we started the first call for projects as a prototype” explained Ovidiu Cimpean – development Director for the Municipality of Cluj-Napoca.

The city of Cluj-Napoca implements the Innovato-r project, financed by the URBACT III Cooperation Program of the European Commission. The URBACT III program is in a position to use resources and knowledge to strengthen the capacity of cities to formulate integrated strategies and actions for urban development on the thematic objectives that correspond to their challenges.     

The initiative to achieve Innovato-R Cluj-Napoca is part of the activities of the good practice transfer network of the same name that aimes at the participatory development of projects dedicated to improving the performance of local government, reducing losses and capitalization of resources, increasing the quality of public services, and others. The approach, based on the concept of "Minimum Viable Product" (MVP), is transferred through Innovato-R to the following partner cities: Metropole Du Grand Paris (FR), Cluj Napoca (RO), Murcia (ES), Porto (PT), Veszprem (HU) and Rotterdam (NL). The local transfer proposed by the Cluj-Napoca City Hall concerns the construction of the Innovato-R Cluj-Napoca platform by adapting the already existing public budgeting online platform for the citizens of the city (www.bugetareparticipativa.ro).

The central idea of the project: supporting innovative solutions inside the city hall, for optimization, communication, quality and sustainability of processes from public administration.

A total of 19 projects were submitted on the Innovato-R platform, and after the evaluation the ULG will announce the results in the next few weeks. All the participants will be invited to an online webinar to follow-up on this process and we are considering a second iteration of the process that will also allow us a data analysis and a better documenting of the transfer and learning process from the URBACT good practice to the way Cluj-Napoca public servants received and adopted this amazing tool.