MedeINN — Medellín's Public-Procurement Innovation Lab

MedeINN is a public innovation lab created in 2021 under the Mayor's Office of Medellín, Colombia, as part of the city's 'Medellín Futuro' development plan. It applies a 'public procurement for innovation' methodology in which the city builds a database of specific public-sector challenges, prioritises them by feasibility, launches open calls inviting external solution providers to compete, screens proposals by technology-readiness level and security requirements, and then runs monitored pilots before any citywide rollout.

Between 2021 and 2026 the lab launched four open-innovation processes addressing 11 distinct public challenges spanning rural connectivity, paper reduction in public administration, smart parking, green-space management, waste management and teen-pregnancy prevention. Documented pilot results include 350 rural citizens connected to the internet in previously unserved areas, 19–35 tonnes of paper saved annually through digitised processes, 33 parking lots equipped with IoT sensors and analytics, and a predictive model built for optimising green-area maintenance.

The lab's methodology — rather than any single pilot — has been actively shared with municipal leaders beyond Medellín, including the cities of Cali, Manizales and Bogotá within Colombia, and the municipalities of Manabí (Ecuador) and Viña del Mar (Chile), positioning it as a transferable govtech model rather than a one-off local project. It builds on Medellín's earlier 'Medellín Lab' knowledge-exchange programme with the World Bank, which itself hosted city officials from 8 countries across Africa and East Asia for peer-learning visits. As a programme still only five years old with a modest number of completed pilots, its evidence base is real but limited in scale compared with more mature city-innovation programmes.

Read the full analysis: https://oecd-opsi.org/innovations/medeinn-public-innovation-lab-with-govtech/