Leuven named European Capital of Innovation 2020

Leuven, Belgium, has been named the 2020 European Capital of Innovation for its collaborative approach to improving residents’ lives and deploying new solutions to city challenges.

The city will receive a €1 million (US$1.2  million) prize funded under Horizon 2020, the EU’s research and innovation programme.

Five runner-up cities – Cluj-Napoca (Romania), Espoo (Finland), Helsingborg (Sweden), Valencia (Spain) and Vienna (Austria) – will receive €100,000 each.

Speaking to Cities Today, Mayor of Leuven, Mohamed Ridouani, said: “We are very happy and honoured [with the award]. It’s a recognition of how we are focused on bringing people together to create solutions which are needed to improve the way we collaborate.”

“But we don’t want Leuven to become some kind of elitist eco-city, we want everyone to benefit – including people on lower incomes.”

The city is innovating around challenges ranging from climate change and the shift to a circular economy to ensuring high-quality education. Mobility has also been a key area of focus, with the number of cyclists increasing by 40 percent in three years.

Leuven 2030

A key initiative behind its vision is Leuven 2030, a collaboration of over 600 stakeholders – including government, universities, companies, local organisations and citizens – that work together on developing and implementing a climate transition strategy.

This includes a roadmap on carbon neutrality, developed with more than 70 experts, and a set of strategic experiments in collaboration with the European Institute of Innovation and Technology’s Climate-KIC, which identifies levers across multiple domains (citizen engagement, governance, data and monitoring, finance) to unlock change.

The European Capital of Innovation award (also known as iCapital Awards) is open to cities with a minimum of 100,000 inhabitants from EU member states and countries associated with Horizon 2020.

The competition first took place in 2014, and past winners include Barcelona (2014), Amsterdam (2016), Paris (2017), Athens (2018) and Nantes (2019).

Cities are judged on how they implement innovative solutions to societal challenges. These solutions can be completed or ongoing, but must have been implemented in the year prior to the opening of the contest or the contest year itself, and include the following features:

• experimenting with innovative concepts, processes, tools and governance models as a testbed for innovation.
• engaging citizens in the innovation process and ensuring the uptake of their ideas.
• expanding the city’s attractiveness to become a role model for other cities.
• empowering citizens by bringing concrete and measurable added value through the implementation of innovative practices.