Researchers from the City Science group collaborated with the Tiresia research group at the Politecnico di Milano to examine the impact, governance, and best practices of the City Science Network. Founded in 2014 with the first City Science Lab in Andorra, the Network has since grown into a global collaboration spanning cities and territories in ten countries. Over more than a decade, it has developed a distinctive, community-centered model of technological innovation grounded in cross-sector collaboration and locally driven impact.
This research approaches the City Science Network from an innovation management perspective, with a particular focus on understanding Network Labs as Public Value Innovation Ecosystems—how they are created, governed, and sustained across diverse local contexts. To ensure a rigorous and objective analysis, the Tiresia Research Group, led by Federico Bartolomucci, led the data collection and analytical work in collaboration with the City Science team.
The research process included an extensive literature review, a data refinement phase, and more than 20 in-depth interviews with members of the City Science Network. Through this multi-stage process, the team identified 43 best practices drawn from the lived experiences of City Science Labs worldwide. These practices are organized across key thematic categories, including community and leadership, impact management and measurement, agreements, and decision-making structures.
The outcome of the project is a governance framework that makes implicit and tacit knowledge explicit. This framework is intended to support the creation of new labs, strengthen existing ones, and provide practical guidance for practitioners designing and implementing context-based innovations that address complex societal and environmental challenges. Ultimately, this research aims to serve as a launch pad for the City Science Network to continue generating impact—by fostering learning across labs, sharing feedback, and enabling collective reflection and improvement over time.
The 43 best practices, introductions from the research leads, and descriptions of the research practice are outlined in the document below.