Hackathons, semesterathons, and summerathons as vehicles to develop smart city local talent that via their innovations promote synergy between industry, academia, government and citizens

Governments, universities, and companies around the world are seeking ways to promote innovation to build solutions towards Smarter Cities. From IBM experience is key to have a Smart city the following three factors implemented: they instrument (sensors installed in the city to capture data), then must be interconnected (send gathered information from sensors to some place) and finally enable technologically to produce new levels of intelligence. As smart cities grow, living labs are created as platforms to test these solutions in a real-life context before implementing them on cities. Hosting smart cities' themed hackathons is an excellent way for empowering and engaging citizens to be aware of how their active participation can positively affect the quality of life in their cities. Nowadays, there are multiple hackathons across the globe, typically the outcome of those hackathons are not being implemented in the urban places because a lack of a place to test "prototypes" in a controlled environment, here is where Living Labs play a significant role in the development of smart cities solutions. T o create high-quality deliverables, a well-controlled Living Lab is needed, also the follow up of all the ideas generated is a key factor. In this work, a method and “model” to successfully implement solutions in smart cities designed in a Hackathon, Semesterathon or Summerathons described, including usage of Agile and Design Thinking methodologies. Also, a model that integrate the smart cities ecosystem and leading edge technologies (i.e. Using Cognitive API's via IBM Bluemix “Platform As A Service”), under this new Era of Cognitive Computing explained. In in this work, we defined and outlined the key performance indicators (i.e. KPI), that will allow improvement in the success rate of the solutions that will be developed and deploy initially at CUCEA Living Lab and finally deployed at smart cities.