On the occasion of SME4SMARTCITIES' final conference meeting hosted by the project partner BIC EURONOVA in Malaga, Spain in June 2023, a selected group of SMEs and stakeholders got involved in a workshop activity to start the first day on the right foot. Aiming to highlight ups and downs in the project development of the co-created pilots, the activity was organized to provide tips and testimonies for a quite relevant project output: a guideline manual for the SMEs aiming to support them in the development of innovative products and services in a demand-driven approach.

The participating group was composed of five entrepreneurs from Italy, Israel, and Spain, joined by one representative belonging to Genoa Municipality (IT), one Spanish representative from the urban development supporting company Cities Forum and one project manager by CEEIM, partner, and coordinator of SME4SMARTCITIES.

Following a methodology tailored for the occasion by the Italian project partner FILSE, the group was facilitated in the analysis of the project development of their innovative pilot throughout the various steps with a variant of the MoSCoW method. This method consists in brainstorming all the features / activities to be developed and writing them down on a chart where priorities are split among four categories: Must / Should / Could / Won’t. With a very simple role game, the participants were able to focus on three specific time frames (past, present, and future) and overcoming the methodology flaw in progress analysis.

Generally speaking, the different values attributed by the participants distancing the initial idea from the final results were not equally distributed among them. Even if their main objective/focus did not change so much from the initial vision, the hybridization of the solution was unanimously underlined as a great result of the co-creation activity. SME4SMARTCITIES has in fact represented a unique opportunity to identify and apply the necessary adjustments to the solutions planned with other SMEs in a pilot development environment, integrating new features beyond what was initially planned. Nevertheless, some of these features could not be implemented within the pilots and there is still some room for improvement of the solutions in the future.

The workshop resulted very successful as the attendees took the opportunity to discuss their pilot with each other spontaneously replacing some of the planned activities with a sort of improvised roundtable session. Thanks to their readiness the workshop paid off with very useful tips and interesting testimonies that will be featured in the guideline manual for the benefit of all SMEs.