The Portfolio Approach
The transition to circular and regenerative cities is a systemic and complex process in nature. In a global context of uncertainty and rapid change, no one knows the detailed pathway of innovations that are needed to achieve sustainable cities that are circular and regenerative by design. In this perspective, the transition is essentially a discovery and learning process that requires multiple experimentation across a wide range of domains, including regulation and legislation, business case, finance, capacity-building, engagement, and more.
In this Toolkit - and within the design process that underpins it - we adopt a portfolio logic as an approach to trigger experimentation and learning across a full-stack designed transition. The intent is to support the pilot cities (and cities beyond the REFLOW ones) in articulating their circular action plans with a more systemic perspective, defining a set of strategically connected and mutually reinforcing activities and experiments that create new value, guide strategic investments, and offer the highest potential of learning. Moreover, the approach articulates activities and experiments across three horizons of reference - short, medium and long term - as a way to foster strategic and long term visioning and planning. The Portfolio Canvas is shown in Figure 4:
The vertical axis on the right essentially captures the long term vision for a circular and regenerative city, and therefore sets out the core sustainability impacts that are to be achieved across society, economy and environment. In the language of our Collaborative Governance Framework, it describes the social, economic and cultural fabric that unlocks such vision and impacts;
The vertical axis on the left indicates the core levers that inform ‘operational infrastructuring’. These levers are built on preliminary research work developed within REFLOW; however, they are not strictly set, and may evolve as the project makes progress. These intial levers are: finance, business case, data, tech & urban metabolism, regulation & legislation, engagement, capacity building;
The horizontal axis captures activities and experiments across the levers throughout three horizons of reference - short, medium and long term. This axis essentially reflects the strategic infrastructuring layer of our Collaborative Governance Framework, in that it supports the pilot cities in defining connected and mutually reinforcing activities and experiments from the short term towards enduring change and impact.
The unique feature of the REFLOW cities is in that they address different challenges and articulate activities and experiments across different combinations of domains; while they may not cover the full spectrum of the portfolio, the overall approach we aim to follow in the implementation of the Toolkit is to harvest city-based experiments and create a whole REFLOW’s portfolio for circular and regenerative cities, thereby creating an overall inspirational and practical tool supporting transferability beyond the REFLOW cities.
Why EXPERIMENTS beyond ACTIVITIES In order to better understand what works and what does not, we need to define activities that are highly contextualized and place-based, tangible, rapidly implementable, observable and flexible enough to evolve and change. Framing activities as experiments may help introduce these core design criteria as key touchpoints for better capturing learning and improve design and deployment at every iteration.
PORTFOLIO logic
‘In a complex and uncertain world, no one single solution can unlock the innovation we need to solve pressing societal challenges. Instead, we need to cultivate and unleash multiple innovation initiatives that, all together, can form an enabling ecosystem for change, rooted in continuous learning and distributed agency. In the words of OECD-OPSI (2020) an innovation portfolio is an ‘innovation sense-making activity that connects your (and sometimes your partners’) innovation practise – specific projects, initiatives and programmes – to the intent and purpose behind those activities as well as the strategic goal of the organisation.
It should connect problem framing to operations and continuous learning; and allow and organisation to sufficiently resource and support innovation towards defined aims. Effective innovation portfolio management does not only look at the composition of the portfolio (list of innovation projects, initiatives, or investments) and problems that they connect to, but it analyses what in the system and the organisational structures allows an innovation portfolio to be successful in the long term.’’
See: https://oecd-opsi.org/prototype-distributed-innovation-portfolio-exploration/
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