In just over 18 months, Digital Media Exchange (DMEx) has successfully built digital infrastructure and new opportunities for people in Sheffield to work in the creative and digital industries and to use digital technology to support new local businesses. Digital Opportunities: Pathways to Enterprise celebrated the achievements of the DMEx programme in Sheffield.

1. CHRIS DYMOND
Unfolding provides independent
Digital Transformation and Innovation Strategy
for organisations, teams and cities.
CHRIS@UNFOLDING.CO.UK
@CHRISDYMOND

2. 2/18
SMART CITY
OPPORTUNITIES FOR
DIGITAL MEDIA

3. 3/18
SMARTSHEFFIELD

4. 4/18
THIS IS A PREVIEW!
CAVEAT 1

5. 5/18
THIS IS NOT A STRATEGY!
CAVEAT 2

6. 6/18
THERE IS NO MONEY!
CAVEAT 3

7. 7/18
THIS WILL BE WORDY!
CAVEAT 4

8. 8/18
“Sheffield has a long tradition of civic and
commercial innovation, and its Smart City
approach is a continuation of this, bringing
resources together creatively and collaboratively
to drive innovation across a broad framework of
city domains. Sheffield has a deeply human focus,
both in its desire to engage and inspire, and to
deliver outcomes that increase inclusiveness,
cohesion, resilience and prosperity for all.”
IDENTITY

9. 9/18
THEMES
Inclusion
Leadership
Innovation
Data
Collaboration
Resilience

10. 10/18
The city and its leaders need to be more agile, to be able to adapt to a
dynamic environment, with the capability of the Smart City to make
decision‐making faster and easier also important. It is important that the
city receives collaborative leadership, with this connected to the need for a
new city operating model in which silos are broken down and work takes
place across rather than within organisations. Citizen engagement is
crucial to ensure ownership and understanding of city issues doesn’t just
rest at the top, and also to ensure leaders can understand and respond to
grassroots concerns and thus connect with and harness movements. This
all needs to be done within the context of a clear and collectively held
vision for the city.
LEADERSHIP

11. 11/18
Building on the commitment Sheffield has made to fairness, it is vital that
any move towards ‘Smart’ does not leave people behind, so digital
inclusion is a crucial element. Linking with the point above around citizen
engagement is the need for smarter civic dialogue, better linking the
vibrant and challenging discussions that take place on social media and
other online spaces with more traditional city fora. Opportunities also
exist to develop or utilise existing engagement platforms to find different
ways of connecting with people; building creativity and play into the City
will also encourage more people to engage. Finally, increasing the
visibility of city systems will also increase opportunities for citizen
engagement, and for citizen‐led design to ensure new applications are
designed around, and with, the people who will use them.
INCLUSION

12. 12/18
Sheffield needs to become a place of permissionless innovation, allowing
good new ideas to develop without restrictions. It also needs to make use
of challenge‐driven innovation, making better use of the skills of its
citizens by engaging them in solving its problems. It should provide
support for the city ecosystem and economy by moving to open
commissioning and procurement, making it easier for a range of city
organisations to bid to supply public services. It should also look at how it
can provide support around funding & bid writing. Sheffield will need to
take an innovation risk portfolio approach, balancing a range of low‐risk,
evolutionary projects with higher‐risk, disruptive proposals, and explore
new business models, such as crowd‐funding, sponsorship or partnering,
and opportunities for new investment streams.
INNOVATION

13. 13/18
Sheffield needs to look at ecosystem support, creating and supporting the right
conditions for innovation and collaboration, including networks, information and
knowledge sharing, and awareness and promotion of activity. It needs to do some
resource mapping to ensure there is a clear and transparent understanding of the
resources that exist in the city for use. It needs to consider the benefits of shared
services, not just from the point of view of cost savings but also the benefits for
radically improving citizen experiences. There needs to be more cross-sectoral
engagement and working, with this fostered and encouraged wherever possible. In
particular, ways to involve the city’s digital sector in addressing Sheffield’s challenges
should be explored. Finally the city should look at collaboration platforms: there are a
range of existing digital platforms aimed at supporting collaboration and the city
needs to better understand how these could be used, including the surrounding
architecture such as communities, conversations and other activity.
COLLABORATION

14. 14/18
Open data is a crucial aspect of any smart strategy, but it is not just a matter of
making data publicly available. It is also about how it is made accessible and usable.
As important is better data sharing, which can provide better insight and allocation of
resources for agencies, and a better experience for citizens. There is currently much
work being done in this area around common standards and protocols, but faster
progress could be made. Sheffield should look at modelling city systems, an area
where it has made progress but could do more. There are also large opportunities for
collaboration with contractors, universities and local research spin‐outs, as well as
opportunities for involving citizens through the use of observatories and crowd‐
sourcing. Finally the city needs to tell a good story on privacy: clearly and tangibly
stating the city's commitment to privacy can complement its Smart vision and be a
significant differentiator. For instance, the city could commit to pro‐actively testing
the anonymity of every open data set published.
DATA

15. 15/18
Sheffield must continue to prioritise sustainability: it has a commitment to becoming
more self‐sufficient, as outlined in the Green Commission report, and its smart city
vision must reflect this. Sheffield has also made a commitment to address community
resilience: by making smart city practitioners aware of the dynamics of community
resilience, new innovations can be brought to bear in this area. The Fairness
Commission report also highlighted the importance of promoting financial resilience
in the city, for example by way of ensuring fair rates of pay. Finally, there is a need
for resilient systems, with an oft‐expressed risk inherent in smart city activity that
the city, its systems, and especially its citizens, become too heavily reliant on the
consistent functioning of technology, and lose the ability to properly sustain
themselves when things fail. Mitigating these risks must be an important focus of
Sheffield's strategy.
RESILIENCE

16. 16/18
CORE DESIRE
Above all, our desire is for the city’s leaders,
across all domains, to be more knowledgeable
and confident in the story they tell about
Sheffield’s ‘smartness’, and to actively
embrace technology and new ideas as the
city has done so many times in the past.

17. 17/18
PARTNERS

18. THANK YOU!
CHRIS@UNFOLDING.CO.UK
@CHRISDYMOND