CrowdInsights is a Digital Cities Action Line Innovation Activity

CrowdInsights is a Digital Cities Action Line Innovation Activity* that actively monitors urban environments detecting the composition, dynamics and movements of crowds. It provides data to support decision-making for city planners and businesses.

Often, the work of city planners is hampered by data and processes that can be obsolete, resource intensive and error-prone. CrowdInsights provides a solution that integrates data collected from IoT sensors, mobile phones and social media to provide comprehensive, multi-scale views of urban dynamics such as how, when and where people move within a city. With CrowdInsights, urban planners can plan pedestrian areas based on the actual volume and frequency of human movement. In addition, businesses and tourism operators can use the data to develop more targeted and effective marketing campaigns. This tool is innovative in that it provides comprehensive and cross-sourced data that includes both real-time and historical results adapted for citizens and for local decision makers and businesses.
 

• For citizens: a mobile App will be developed that enables the connection of people with the city and offers personalised information, city loyalty cards, and digital coupons.
   
• For urban planners: a web dashboard application will report and allow the exploration of data collected within the city across the multiple sources.
   

The solution will be marketed to the tourist industry and local retailers. Three initial pilot studies of CrowdInsights, two in the North of Italy (Como and Trento) and one in the Netherlands (Amsterdam), will be completed by the end of 2017. Afterwards, the solution will be expanded via a commercial launch. Michele Vescovi, who leads the Innovation Activity said: “The stakeholders we’re working with continue to be amazed at the variety, detail and rich potential of the information produced by the solution. The power of CrowdInsights lies in its dynamic, stratified and multi-sided makeup, that is able to describe crowd behaviour from a wide set of perspectives. We hope to make data-driven governance and decision making at city level much easier and affordable and in the long term, to make such solutions something city stakeholders cannot do without.” CrowdInsights is one of the 11 Innovation Activities of the Digital Cities Action Line for 2017. 

This Action Line leverages the digital transformation of the cities through centralised, participative and collaborative interactions between city actors: government, city service providers, industry, and citizens. This transformation enables the deployment of disruptive information, mobility and safety services in the cities. EIT Digital partners involved in this Innovation Activity include: Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Politecnico di Milano, and the  Technical University of Delft. *EIT Digital seeks to generate significant innovations from top European research. As such, we focus our investments on a limited number of innovation areas known as Innovation Action Lines, that we have selected with respect to their European relevance and leadership potential. Each Innovation 

Action Line comprises a portfolio of activities including:

• open innovation activities carried out by the EIT Digital Partners and
• fast-growing technology startups that are ready to scale commercially.

Our Innovation Activities deliver new products or services, create startups and spinoffs to commercialise outputs from projects and encourage the transfer of technologies for market entry. Follow CrowdInsights on Twitter at @crowdinsightseu and contact by e-mail via crowdinsights@fbk.eu.

About EIT Digital

EIT Digital is a leading European open innovation organisation that brings together a partnership of over 130 top European corporations, SMEs, start-ups, universities and research institutes. EIT Digital invests in strategic areas to accelerate market uptake of research-based digital technologies and to bring entrepreneurial talent and leadership to Europe. EIT Digital is a Knowledge and Innovation Community of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). EIT Digital headquarters are in Brussels with co-location centres in Berlin, Budapest, Eindhoven, Helsinki, London, Madrid, Paris, Stockholm, Trento and a hub in Silicon Valley.