Published on March 3, 2025
In Montreal, innovation culture at the city level means working with all kinds of people – people in neighbourhoods, non-profit organizations and educational institutions – to create meaningful social and environmental progress. This collective and participatory approach is what helped the city’s proposed project Montréal in Common secure 50 million in funding from the federal government in the 2019 Smart Cities Challenge.
Over the past five years, Montréal in Common has launched a variety of community-led initiatives, including car and bike sharing, kitchen sharing, and the development of urban greenhouses. Centering citizen involvement in the ecological transition is a major goal of the project.
“It wasn’t just a portfolio of projects, or a major project focused on technology,” says Maxime Thibault-Vézina, director of the City of Montreal’s Urban innovation lab. “It was really about how we can develop a collaborative approach – centred on collective impact and collective intelligence– to create a community of innovation with the development of data in a very free, ethical and responsible framework.”
One strong example of collaborative innovation is the LocoMotion project, a cargo-bike and personal vehicle-sharing service.
“It’s the citizens’ committees who themselves decide to set up LocoMotion and govern. So, we’re strengthening the power of citizens to take action on active mobility in their local areas,” says Thibault-Vézina.”
Montreal, a leader in the civic innovation space for some time, is taking innovation further than most cities dare to. Raphaël Guyard, a senior advisor with Maison de l’innovation sociale, is working on the Civic Innovation Laboratory for Regulatory Experimentation (LICER) with the Montréal in Common project. Here, partners and citizens work together to identify the regulatory obstacles facing public transport projects.
“There are labs that work on designing new products and services. There have been labs working on governance models, particularly for the collective management of agricultural land. But we rarely see labs looking at regulation and co-production” says Guyard. LICER lab proposes participatory and experimental methods to remove the regulatory obstacles that can slow down innovation at different levels and better meet the needs and realities of communities. The lab also aspires to work with communities across the country.
“What we are going to try to do in the near future, is a sort of summer school with the national school of public administration (ENAP) which we hope will be able to bring together the people who are working on this, and then be able to give rise to and lead a community of practice on the issues of co-produced regulatory experimentation,” says Guyard. “And if some of the people listening [to this podcast] are interested, it would be good to create links and make contacts. That way, we can share our practices.”
What Montréal in Common is showing us is that civic innovation cannot be purely technological but rather must be human and collaborative. The project’s ultimate goal? To improve quality of life for everyone and share what they’ve learned from these valuable experiments with other cities.
Listen to the Season 5 episode of Face au Futur / The Future Fix conducted in French: Montreal: ville-laboratoire.
