The future center as an urban innovation engine

The purpose of this article is to describe a future center as an urban innovation engine for the knowledge city, to understand the success factors of a future center and how this success can be replicated systematically in the implementation and development of future centers in the future.

Nine future centers were visited and a longitudinal action research‐based case study was conducted at the regional Be'er Sheva PISGA Future Center in Israel, within the educational domain.

There are 13 conceptual building‐blocks for a future center and the unifying principle is conversations. The PISGA future center put the concept of a future center into action and was guided by six operating principles: values, experiment and learning, organizational structure, partnerships, physical space, and virtual space. They were able to initiate ten new educational projects within the first two years of operation. A conceptual model of a regional future center was developed and tested on the PISGA case, defining the five key ingredients as community conversations, future images, an innovation lab, a knowledge and intelligence center and implementation projects.

After two years of testing the findings, only intermediate results are available. Further research is needed to develop and test the concepts and model further.

This paper provides building‐blocks and a generic model that can be used by the creators of next generation future centers.

This paper provides the first generic building‐blocks and the first generic implementation and operational model for a future center.