Innovating a City Through Citizen Participation: Could Interdisciplinary Orientation Play a Role?

This research was born during a course within a postgraduate program on innovation for doctoral and postdoctoral studies. Trying to find a research idea that could bring together various research subjects and experiences from all fields of economics and business, allowing students to work on a common agenda, looking also for a pragmatic aim, we decided to use previous research backgrounds and results to make the city in which they all studied a more innovative one. Considering the huge importance and amount of previous work on innovation, the societal challenges with which we are confronted, requiring an interdisciplinary perspective, as well as the need to transform our cities in better living and working places, the research question was raised: what does it take to innovate a city, from the people’s (human resource) perspective? It is a subject at the intersection of several fields and streams of research: inter and transdisciplinary research, public administration, innovative cities in terms of governance and e-government, civic participation and citizen science, researchers’ skills and competencies - a complex array of intertwined challenges. The research objective was twofold: to find out doctoral and postdoctoral students’ (generally addressed throughout the paper as researchers) perceptions about the intangible human innovation required for innovating a city and to find out their orientation towards interdisciplinarity. We conducted a semi-structured group interview with 18 researchers, to identify the most important traits of human innovation, followed by a survey with 30 researchers to measure perceptions towards interdisciplinary research.