Changing The Innovation Status Quo

Given the economic, environmental and societal imperatives, New Urbana is applying an innovation studio approach to improving the lifecycle management of critical infrastructure and the built environment.

In the US, recent reports give our critical infrastructure a failing grade (D+). To make matters worse, there’s a worldwide $15 trillion infrastructure delivery gap over the next 20 years. Under-resourced and under-served geographies have even more acute concerns.

To close these gaps, enterprises and infrastructure operators must continue to innovate. To stay relevant and profitable, they need to improve the speed, quality, and safety of designing, building, operating, and managing their assets. At the same time, they need to ensure support for regulatory and environmental (ESG) goals.

“Rather than a shortage of inspiration, we’ve observed that older companies’ main challenges are an excess of institutional control and an inability to scale up innovations. In a recent McKinsey survey, many respondents said parent companies had hindered the development of their start-ups and limited entrepreneurs’ freedom to make decisions.”

(McKinsey & Co, June 2019)

Establishing A Winning Innovation Formula

To address this opportunity, New Urbana is using a co-innovation model. It begins by engaging enterprises and institutions directly to uncover quantitative, high priority problems. Along with any IP from the organization, this drives the ideation process and problem opportunity validation.

From there, a venture studio model programmatically addresses the key reason for new venture failures. Studios (or in this case, Co-Labs) is where venture builders and domain experts come together to provide more than just capital.

"...seed-stage investments for startups created by top-tier studios are more likely (34%) to result in an exit than the average Series D investment (27%)...some studios...boast a 50% or higher success rate...Elite venture builders and racer studios can create startups with more than a 4% chance of becoming a unicorn."

GSSN, The Rise of StartupStudios

The New Urban approach enhances best practices from current venture studios and similar initiatives based on decades of experience in early-stage to global technology companies.

Our framework design maximizes the trajectory for IP value creation while continuously reducing risk. Plus, insights from prior large scale public and private sector deployments further inform our approach. We also incorporate values that support inclusive and diverse cultures that reward transparency, intentional outcomes, engagement, and clear communications. 

The result is three pillars for co-innovation:

• Operations - A gated process with hands-on multi-disciplinary teams, rigorous best practices along with deep technology, business, and domain industry expertise;
• Networks - Extensive ecosystem relationships across technology, market research, engineering, manufacturing, financial, and academic institutions for insights across value chains and business models; and
• Technology - Through product management, agile development, and DevSecOps best practices accelerate secure, scalable and manageable solutions development while minimizing technical debt.

Creating Smarter Infrastructure

To address the targeted economic, environmental and societal value from improving the lifecycle management of critical infrastructure, we focus on optimizing the interactions and relationships between people, assets, spaces, data, and the environment.

New Urbana co-innovates with enterprises, institutions, and operators in Utilities (Energy, Water, Waste, etc.), Transportation (Ports, Railways, Airports, Roads, Tunnels, etc.) and Mobility (including supply chain, communications, etc.) as well as The Built Environment (e.g. Real Estate, Architecture, Engineering, etc.).

The business, regulatory and technology challenges in these segments make them inherently complex. Success requires broad domain, technology, and business acumen as well as the ability to cross-pollinate the same from adjacent industries.

Accordingly, the New Urbana team and ecosystem relationships have expertise in smart cities, transportation, energy, water, communications, and the built environment as well as more than 10 other industries. This includes experiences supporting large public and private sector projects across the globe, spanning the entire lifecycle from planning to operations.

Also, our product management and technical expertise enable us to build and integrate best-in-class software, hardware, sensors, IoT and communications networks, data science, and security technologies.

By starting with a problem-first co-innovation approach, these technology choices are solutions that deliver well-defined outcomes - not a technology looking for solutions. This approach also ensures that solutions meet applicable industry, regulatory, and government standards.

Co-Innovation For Smarter Infrastructure Is A Winning Approach

So if you are an enterprise or institution responsible for improving the lifecycle management of critical infrastructure and the built environment who wants to innovate for sustainable economic, environmental and societal value now and into the future - let's chat.