The Handbook for Small Cities provides municipalities with both inspiration and practical guidance for public service innovation. It combines a collection of urban innovation case studies from across the Baltic Sea region (Finland, Lithuania, Poland, Latvia and Estonia) with a step-by-step roadmap for developing and implementing new solutions. The handbook helps cities address challenges such as demographic change, urban congestion, and social and economic inequalities through Public Service Innovation (PSI), enabling them to make better use of limited resources while improving the quality and accessibility of public services.

To support practical learning, the handbook is complemented by a free online training course, “Innovative Decision-Making in Public Services”, designed for public sector professionals and changemakers. The self-paced course equips participants with innovation methods, project management tools and data-driven approaches to support more effective public service delivery. Through videos, quizzes and real-life case studies, learners gain practical skills that can be directly applied in their professional work. The course has been openly available on the CEPHEI online learning platform since March 2025.

Both the handbook and the training course were tested during a seminar held in Smiltene (Latvia) in June 2025, where representatives of municipalities and regional organisations, e.g. from Smiltene Municipality, Liepāja Municipality, Vidzeme Planning Region, Tartu City provided feedback that helped further refine the solution.
The project actively engaged public authorities, research organisations and innovation-driven companies from Finland, Latvia, Poland and Lithuania in the joint development and testing of innovative digital solutions to help the public sector deliver services more effectively. The greatest value of this transnational cooperation stemmed from its cross-sectoral nature, bringing together technological expertise and the practical experience of municipalities from different countries facing similar challenges, including limited resources, low innovation capacity and increasing societal demands. This collaboration led to the co-creation of advanced digital solutions tailored to the specific needs of small and medium-sized cities, as well as the development of an online course promoting Immersive, Intelligent and Innovative (3I) approaches to support data-driven, citizen-centred decision-making in the public sector.

Practical tools with lasting impact

To date, the project has sparked the interest of 23 institutions from Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Finland in adopting the developed solutions and rethinking their operational workflows to improve public service delivery. Municipalities and public organisations involved in the project intend to apply the “Innovative Decision-Making in Public Services” training course in their daily work, particularly by using tools such as Value Analysis (VA), TRIZ, PM² and open data practices to plan and manage local initiatives more effectively. To support further uptake, the Vidzeme Planning Region and the Mazovia Development Agency have actively promoted the training course through their respective networks.

Several project partners and associated organisations continue to use the AR-solutions developed and tested during the project. For example, Smiltene Municipality (LV) continues to use the AR City Guide and smart benches to provide real-time tourism and public service information, as well as AR visualisation tools for infrastructure planning. While the City of Radom (PL) continues to use the Participatory Budgeting solution to strengthen citizen engagement. The successful implementation of the AR-solution pilots has inspired other municipalities, including Joniškis and Tauragė (LT), as well as Garwolin (PL), to adopt the digital solutions developed within the project.
Survey results further demonstrate the project’s lasting impact. Participating organisations indicated their intention to continue applying the knowledge and skills acquired (17 responses), adopt new tools (11 responses), implement new procedures or workflows (4 responses), and introduce organisational changes (1 response).