This post is written by Chaiyatorn Limapornvanich, Department Director, National Innovation Agency.

  • The problem: Cities today must respond effectively to the needs of dynamic urbanisation. They need to learn and embrace an innovation process in their practices.

  • Why it matters: As ‘innovation’ appears to be ambiguous and in contrast to their conservative practices, municipalities will likely need more of an appetite for risk and foster a culture of embracing change. Empowering the public sector with a suitably-designed innovation process is essential.

  • The solution: Chiang Mai City Lab is a collaborative platform allowing the municipality to embark on an innovation journey with crucial stakeholders. Local government and diverse stakeholders come to learn, collaborate and exercise new ways of dealing with the city’s future challenges.

Innovation has become necessary for municipalities to bring positive changes and transformation to cities and local communities. In the last decade, the concept of urbanisation has spread out across Thailand. Thailand’s urbanisation rate significantly increased from 44.20% in 2011 to 52.16% in 2021. Even though the urbanisation rate is still lower than in other developed countries, where it can reach 80-90%, Thailand is transforming from a predominantly rural country into an urban one. As more and more Thais are now living in urban areas, many cities across the country are encountering several challenges in urban development, such as an overcrowded population, insufficient utilities, underdeveloped facilities, social problems, environmental issues and a disparity between urban and rural areas. This places enormous pressure on municipalities in many developing urban areas regarding public service delivery and demands municipalities to respond effectively to these dynamic urbanisation needs.

💬 Let the author know what you think about how innovation can meet the challenges of urbanisation by leaving a comment below

The challenges in Chiang Mai City Municipality

Thailand’s municipalities, known as ‘Thesaban’, are government district-level authorities that are autonomous in developing and governing their urban areas. Chiang Mai City Municipality, located in Chiang Mai Province, is a city-level municipality with a population of 122,000 and a popular tourist destination accommodating many visitors. However, the municipality faces several urbanisation-related challenges, including rapid population growth, limited public transport, air pollution, primary health service accessibility, inadequate waste management, social inequality, etc. As innovation is recognised as a tool for creating and developing innovative solutions, it is becoming a common approach for many municipalities to handle all municipal matters. However, at the same time, the term ‘innovation’ appears to be abstract for the public sector due to its ambiguity and its contrast to conservative concepts and practices.

The journey encourages the municipality to embrace curiosity, adopt an experimental mindset, understand societal transformations, and take necessary steps to drive positive changes.

While private sector innovation focuses on gaining a competitive advantage and profits, public sector innovation aims to address societal and economic challenges, enhance public value and improve service delivery. However, many public sector organisations will likely need more risk appetite due to their mindfulness of how to spend public funds. In addition, they also often have a deeply ingrained culture that impedes them from embracing change, and this leads to potentially adverse outcomes in pursuing innovation. To overcome this critical challenge, empowering public sector offices with a suitably-designed innovation process is essential. An innovation process allows them to proactively pursue groundbreaking ideas, feel encouraged to break from conservative approaches and share a sense of ownership.

Chiang Mai City Lab’s 4-stage innovation process

Chiang Mai City Lab, an initiative exercised by the National Innovation Agency (NIA) in collaboration with the School of Public Policy, Chiang Mai University (SPP) and Chiang Mai City Municipality, is a collaborative platform for local government and diverse stakeholders to come and learn, collaborate and exercise new ways of dealing with the city’s future challenges. Interactive and collaborative actions have been placed with young ‘Dreamers and Doers’ to build strong connections and commitments, inspire changes and develop creative strategies toward tangible outcomes. This intervention can take many forms, and one practical form is an ‘innovation process’. An innovation process is a set of steps that take us from the idea’s conception to the idea’s implementation. Through the process, vision and goals must be communicated, collaborators must be engaged and creative ideas must be designed and exercised. The process enables innovative ideas and solutions to be tested in real-world settings to better understand city and societal transformations.

Chiang Mai City Lab works on the four-step process of:

  1. Unpack ‘Hopes’ and ‘Fears’
  2. Find ‘Hopes’ and ‘Fears’
  3. Transform ‘Hopeful’ into ‘Wishful’
  4. Push ‘Wishful’ towards ‘Willful’

First, a series of participatory processes - e.g. an interactive exhibition, online brainstorming and interactive art gallery took place to explore the hopes and fears of Chiang Mai’s citizens regarding the challenges and transformations of the city. Second, the voices of Chiang Mai’s citizens and the scanned drivers of change were developed into the scenarios of preferred futures. These were then used as a shared vision for developing transformative strategies. Third, innovation development initiatives and actions were rolled out to provide passionate ‘dreamers and doers’, e.g. active citizens, local governments, service providers and tech companies co-creating opportunities and resource support. Lastly, innovative ideas and solutions were tested and piloted in a sandbox to explore the transformative impact, gain acknowledgment and learn how to upscale.

Chiang Mai City Lab also offers a variety of resources and support to help innovators bring their ideas to life, including a series of events on innovation challenges, a co-working space to work, collaborate, and network, training and mentorship programmes for skills and knowledge development, and resource access such as funding, data and experts. As a result, since the platform started in 2021, more than 15 innovative solutions have been developed, prototyped and piloted in the Chiang Mai municipal area. For example, the household remedy dispensing machine, known as ‘Tuu Pun Ya’ [see photo], is a solution developed through this deliberative process. The solution aims to solve the inequality issue of people experiencing homelessness and their access to basic health needs. The issue was one of the top listed issues revealed and identified by the Unpack ‘Hopes’ and ‘Fears’ and the Find ‘Hopes’ and ‘Fears’ processes, respectively. The innovative solution was co-created between the municipality, selective technology companies and a group of active citizens, through the Transform ‘Hopeful’ into ‘Wishful’ process. Then ‘Tuu Pun Ya’ was piloted within the actual context during the Push ‘Wishful’ towards the ‘Willful’ process. This eventually allows people experiencing homelessness convenient access to basic health needs.

An innovation journey

Chiang Mai City Lab is a collaborative platform allowing the municipality to embark on an innovation journey with crucial stakeholders. The journey encourages the municipality to embrace curiosity, adopt an experimental mindset, understand societal transformations and take necessary steps to drive positive changes. The journey assists the municipality in turning innovative solutions into possible outcomes and how to scale them up. The ultimate goal is to foster development in a municipal area by encouraging the generation of innovative solutions that effectively address specific problems and cater to the unique needs of each respective area.

Article: household remedy dispensing machine for all

Figure 1. ‘Tuu Pun Ya’ - a household remedy dispensing machine for all (source: iChiangmai)


Article: Fig 2. ‘Tuu Pun Ya’,

Figure 2. ‘Tuu Pun Ya’, located in the Chiang Mai’s old town (source: iChiangmai)


Article: Fig 3. Basic health needs

Figure 3. Basic health needs can be accessed conveniently (source: iChiangmai)


Article: fig 4 Fig 4. The correct amounts of household remedies

Figure 4. The correct amounts of household remedies are stored in appropriate conditions and ready for dispensing (source: iChiangmai)


Done reading? Make sure to share your own tips by leaving a comment below ⬇️

(Image credit: Unsplash)