Digital Kitchener Innovation Lab

Suburbs

The Digital Kitchener Innovation Lab is a unique space located at the Communitech Hub designed to bring new thinking to civic challenges. Kitchener is one of the first municipalities in Canada to open a lab dedicated to exploring how the Internet of Things can improve the lives of citizens. Leveraging the city-wide narrowband network, the lab will develop solutions for city services such as monitoring water mains, traffic conditions, streetlights, waste containers and more.

 Our vision
We're in this together. In order to realize the full potential of Digital Kitchener, we must be willing to lead and be brave. We must be willing to go where there are no existing best practices--and create them.
 Our mandate

Doing. Thinking. Dreaming. 

The lab mandate consists of a 70-20-10 split of time and resources allowing us to research, ideate, prototype, validate, implement, test and deploy. 

  • 70 per cent of time and effort will be spent on low risk innovation activities like leveraging streetlight data and IOT exploration. 
  • 20 per cent of time and effort will be spent on moderate risk innovation activities like smart city involvement and awareness. 
  • 10 per cent of time and effort will be spent on high risk innovation activities like concept exploration. 

Our mandate is rooted in four primary innovative initiatives:

  • Efficiency (time and effort saving)
  • Insight (decision making knowledge)
  • Cost (savings and revenue)
  • User experience (improving the citizen experience)
 Our ecosystem
The lab is located at the Communitech Hub, a 80,000+ square foot space dedicated to world-leading collaboration and innovation.

In this open, creative environment, the city has greater access to nearly 1,000 tech companies at all stages of growth and development.

We're located in the Back Alley of the Tannery building at 151 Charles St. W in Kitchener.
Our team

Operated by a team of city staff and co-op students, the Digital Kitchener Innovation Lab team will work closely with city staff to bring civic challenges outside of city hall into a more disruptive environment where new ideas can be prototyped and piloted. 

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