How participatory design can help build a strong partnership

An article by Jim Sims, Lead Expert for the BluAct Transfer Network

Across the whole of Europe, cities are wrestling with the challenge of trying to build high-quality, cross sectoral partnerships to deliver citywide urban development projects and programmes.

Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the delivery of city-wide, entrepreneurship programmes, designed to stimulate high-quality business start-ups, to strengthen a city’s business base and create high quality employment opportunities.

As Brad Feld, the author of “Start-up Communities” outlines in his formula for building what he calls a “sustainable, vibrant start-up community anywhere in the world” it takes all kinds of people to make a start-up community.

Outlining how a start-up community needs to be built on a philosophy of inclusiveness, he goes on to explain “If everybody contributes energy into the start-up community, it will get bigger and grow faster and be more successful and be more fun.”

But how do you create the kind of partnership in a city that can work together to deliver collaborative activities and programmes? How can you be inclusive, to involve people in helping to shape the solution?

Well, one city that has worked hard to create such a community is the city of Galati, in Romania.

Working as part of the BluAct Transfer Network - a sustainable urban development initiative supported by the URBACT Programme – Galati used processes and methodologies advocated by URBACT to establish a Local Group to steer their work on creating an effective start-up community and used a process of participatory design, to ensure their partners could help to shape the solution.

Here’s their story.

The BluAct Transfer Network

The BluAct Transfer Network is a network of 7 European port cities (Piraeus, Mataro, Ostend, Galati, Matosinhos, Burgas and Salerno) that came together to transfer a good practice in Blue Economy Entrepreneurship (Piraeus’ Blue Growth Initiative) to the remaining six other cities.

The network aims to support an improvement and transfer of a good practice in the field of Blue Growth innovation and entrepreneurship.

All cities are required, as part of the project, to establish a multi-agency governance structure for managing the transfer process.

However, what distinguished Galati from the other cities is the way they went about this.

A Participatory Process

Galati formed a strong local group of representatives that were interested in building a start-up community. They built trust amongst this group over time, to develop a shared vision of what they wanted to achieve and the part that they played in the process. However, they went one step further and asked them what they could contribute.

They facilitated a process of participatory design to help develop a shared vision for what the group wanted to achieve, supported by the Lead Expert in the project, Jim Sims.

As Jim explains, “What the city of Galati did was gather everyone into a room and got them to work with post-it notes and large print canvases, to design the overall competition structure, the incubation programme and the marketing plan for the overall competition in their city.”

He continues, “What the city did to organise their partners and contribute towards the design of the overall programme in their city really bought them into the project at an early stage and helped them to contribute their skills and expertise to the overall programme”.  

As Costel Hanta, the representative of the City of Galati says, “without our partners commitment to the process, we would have struggled to organise this on our own. These kind of competitions need all the partners to come together to design an effective solution and we were deeply conscious of this from the outset.”

Ultimately, this participatory approach helped Galati secure the commitment of partners towards the project, which went on to organise two hackathons in the city, which generated over 20 business ideas, which the partners are now working with to helping to shape into early-stage businesses.

Even in this stage, because of the work undertaken to design a strong multi-agency delivery model, partners are continuing to support the process, through the delivery of a partnership-based incubation programme.

Which all goes to prove that participatory design, at the early stages of a project can help build a strong partnership delivery model.  

More information

To find out more about the BluAct Network, visit bluact.eu/