MedeINN — Medellín's Public-Procurement Innovation Lab

MedeINN is a public-sector innovation lab established in 2021 by Medellín's Mayor's Office as part of the city's 'Medellín Futuro' development plan, applying a structured 'public procurement for innovation' methodology to municipal challenges.

The lab aims to solve concrete municipal problems by turning public procurement into a vehicle for innovation, moving ideas from an open call through screening and monitored piloting to citywide rollout.

The methodology involves building a database of challenges, prioritising them by feasibility, launching open innovation calls, screening proposals by technology-readiness level and security, and running monitored pilots before scaling successful solutions citywide. Between 2021 and 2026 the lab ran four open-innovation processes addressing 11 public challenges.

Documented pilot outputs include 350 rural citizens connected to the internet in previously unserved areas, an estimated 19–35 tonnes of paper saved annually through digitised processes, 33 parking lots equipped with IoT sensors and analytics, and a predictive model for optimising green-area maintenance.

The lab's methodology has reportedly been shared with officials in other Colombian cities (Cali, Manizales, Bogotá) as well as in Manabí, Ecuador, and Viña del Mar, Chile, which the source presents as evidence of transferability, though no confirmed independent replication is documented on the page.