The City of Munich's Innovation Competition is aimed at students, creative minds, and entrepreneurs who want to develop innovative solutions to specific challenges and tasks facing Munich's city administration. The most convincing solutions will be awarded innovation prizes, further developed in collaboration with the city administration, and tested in practice.
At the award ceremony for the innovation prizes, Mayor Katrin Habenschaden the high value of the prize. Ideally, not only the Munich city administration would benefit from the competition results, but also the people of Munich. She commented:
“Munich can only accelerate its path to becoming a smart city by regularly testing innovative solutions.”
“Healthy in old age: Digitization of a service and care network”
With the challenge "Healthy in Old Age: Digitization of a Service and Care Network," the Department of Health sought a solution to digitally support the Prevention Network for Old Age (PiA) in Neuperlach, consisting of stakeholders from the health, education, and social sectors. The goal is to enable these stakeholders to network with minimal effort and easily connect their clients—elderly people with diverse support needs—with services. The innovation award for this challenge went to Helper portalThe jury believes the company's approach, based on a portal for recruiting volunteers, especially for those in need of care, offers a good starting point for further development into a coordination platform for integrating local institutions. In particular, the idea of a precise digital matching of needs and offers of assistance can significantly simplify the network's work.
“Expanding Munich towns with digital innovations”
The IT Department, in cooperation with the Municipal Department, had set the challenge "Expanding Munich's Places with Digital Innovations" for the innovation competition. The goal was to improve the Munich city administration's online offerings, such as the Munich GeoPortal, with the help of innovative digital elements such as ChatGPT. These were intended to digitally expand and individualize selected Munich places, thereby making them more accessible. Team Puppet won over the jury with its City Tour web app. The innovative approach of a city app for Munich was particularly well received. It uses innovative elements of artificial intelligence and speech recognition to provide users with real-time, personalized, and accurate information. At the same time, it also consistently focuses on the relevance of inclusion, user-friendliness, and digital participation in urban society.
“Digital implementation of the zonal diesel driving ban”
To improve air quality in the city, the city has introduced a diesel driving ban. The aim is to sustainably reduce traffic-related emissions and air pollution. However, the effectiveness of the adopted climate protection measure depends directly on the extent to which compliance can actually be verified. Inspecting vehicles in the environmental zone requires a large amount of personnel and is therefore neither practical nor effective. With the challenge "Digital Implementation of the Zonal Diesel Driving Ban," the District Administration Department sought a solution to conduct the verification digitally and in a resource-efficient manner. The startup Transcality was able to convince the jury with its approach. The solution involves automatically capturing license plates and comparing them with the available exemptions. Transcality relies on the use of a digital twin. This is intended to help find optimal locations for the cameras for randomly capturing license plates and to test the recognition rate in the digital environment.
“Text and the City – Text Mining in Urban Development”
The Department of Urban Planning and Building Regulations formulated the challenge "Text and the City – Text Mining in Urban Development." It addresses the question of how the city of Munich can automatically identify conflicting objectives and synergies between various projects and plans with different thematic focuses in the sustainable and social development of its city center. The startup's proposed solution Legal-Pythia LLP Based on explainable artificial intelligence (AI), the project aims to expand the approach of fact-based automatic text analysis to include qualitative, context-based evaluations. By using explainable artificial intelligence, it is possible to trace the basis on which certain conclusions were reached. This makes the evaluations comprehensible and gives the City of Munich the opportunity to learn from the project for the future.
After the summer break, the winners of the innovation awards will further develop their proposed solutions to the respective tasks in a co-creation phase with the city administration and test them in practice.
The next round of Innovation competition will be announced in spring 2024. Interested parties can already apply register hereto be automatically informed about the start of the tender.
