# Campus City Project: Challenge Living Lab for Smart Cities
###### Abstract  
This work presents the Campus City initiative followed by the Challenge Living Lab platform to promote research, innovation, and entrepreneurship with the intention to create urban infrastructure and creative talent (human resources) that solves different community, industrial and government Pain Points within a Smart City ecosystem. The main contribution of this work is to present a working model and the open innovation ecosystem used in Tecnologico de Monterrey that could be used as both, a learning mechanism as well as a base model for scaling it up into a Smart Campus and Smart City. Moreover, this work presents the Smart Energy challenge as an example of a pedagogic opportunity for the development of competencies. This included the pedagogic design of the challenge, the methodology followed by the students and the results. Finally, a discussion on the findings and learnings of the model and challenge implementation. Results showed that Campus City initiative and the Challenge Living Lab allows the identification of highly relevant and meaningful challenges while providing a pedagogic framework in which students are highly motivated, engaged, and prepared to tackle different problems that involve government, community, industry, and academia. s 2021 11 11085 1108 11085 by all stakeholders participating in the decision making process: citizens, government, academia, private sector, investors, and entrepreneurs (upper right part of Figure 1) [1,16]. The creation or modernization of public policies is a crucial step within this framework, especially in regards to the material, economic and human resources available to contribute to these projects and reach the goal of transforming a community or a city into a smart environment [16]. Moreover, feedback cycles are important to ensure an effective and efficient implementation of the project solutions. Feedback is based on data, digital technologies and interconnected visualization dashboards (Internet of Things, Information Systems, Artificial Intelligence etc. [2,11]) that allow the dissemination and socialization of the finished and ongoing projects. Finally, the framework's main goal is to affect the different dimensions related to the Smart City's habitability and QoL. At this point, it is important to highlight the role of the academic institution. The university becomes a key stakeholder for: (1) the identification of solutions for the Pain Points based on innovation, interconnectivity, and research and, (2) the development of human resources with the necessary skills to provide solutions, management, and technology at different levels in a Smart City. Additionally, the active involvement of research institutes and universities is required to sustain an open innovation ecosystem that could drive technological development [17,18]. In 2015, the United States launched an initiative to promote research, innovation, and entrepreneurship (RIE) in university campuses called the \"Smart City Challenge\" project [19]. With the participation of 78 cities, the project concluded that citizen wellbeing is highly influenced by connectivity, information about the city's resources and the need for better mobility. Moreover, various initiatives have studied and developed the transformation of university campuses into smart living laboratories, through which different projects  
Figure 1: Logical framework of a Smart City. could potentially be scaled up to solve the Pain Points of a city [20; 21; 22; 23]. Even though these works provide insight into the operation, organization, technological infrastructure, and methods used, only few studies provide some information on how they could use the Smart Campus concept as a learning mechanism for students [22; 24; 25]. Further work is required to develop Smart Campuses with educational models that can meet the needs of a Smart City while enhancing the learning experience of the students and providing them with the knowledge and skills required to solve different real-life challenges or Pain Points.