WATERLOO REGION - The federal government's Smart Cities Challenge will help expand the innovation economy by making public the huge amounts of data municipalities collect, says Kurtis McBride, co-founder and chief executive officer of Miovision.

McBride is among the technology experts Ottawa consulted when it designed the challenge, a nationwide competition that will see one municipality win a top prize of $50 million.

McBride, along with the University of Waterloo, Communitech, the Canadian Council of Innovators and several technology companies in Waterloo Region all, stressed that open data makes a city smarter.

Municipalities collect huge amounts of data in a wide range of areas, including traffic congestion, water consumption, traffic accidents, construction, restaurant inspections, building permits, garbage collection, pet licensing, noise complaints, population growth, transit ridership, electricity use, crime, fires, property standards, marriages, cycling and flood monitoring.

The thinking behind the push for open data is straightforward. Startups can mine it to find ways to make public services more efficient and transparent. The innovations they create will lead to new software and hardware, new companies and more jobs.

McBride, whose Kitchener-based company develops technology that collects and studies traffic data, is encouraged to see that Infrastructure Canada ranked openness at the top of its list of criteria for the country's first smart cities competition.

"If we are going to talk about smart cities, let's make sure we get the technology architecture right. Let's start with open data to do that," he said.

Currently, municipalities typically use closed systems. That means there is no third-party access to software and hardware platforms. That forces a city to pay more for software and hardware upgrades, rather than allowing startups to innovate on the platforms to find less-costly and more transparent approaches.

McBride believes the Smart Cities Challenge can help open things up.

"One of the things they are trying to do with this competition is build out a showcase location where technologies that are deployed can be replicated across the country," he said.

Infrastructure Canada's competition comes a year after an identical one was held in the United States. Columbus, Ohio won $50 million, beating out 77 other cities for the money. It is using the money to pursue several transportation-related projects, including:

•Electric, self-driving shuttles that bring people from residential neighbourhoods to and from major transit lines.

•Wireless devices that can be quickly installed on vehicles to help avoid collisions.

•A central data exchange about how people are moving around the city.

•A common ticket for all transit options in and out of the region.

•Smart mobility hubs that bring together bikes, pedestrians, private vehicles and transit.

•Tech-enabled parking permits for the city core.

•Real-time data on traffic congestion to help delivery vehicles.

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The first proposal for the Canadian challenge must be submitted to Infrastructure Canada by April 24 next year. The finalists will be selected next summer and each will receive $250,000 to prepare detailed submissions. Finalists will be announced next summer and the winners will be announced in the spring of 2019.

Cities that want to enter the challenge must consult with residents about priorities.

The Region of Waterloo is overseeing the application for the three cities and four townships in the region. Details about the public consultations will be announced in the coming weeks.

"They want the community to articulate a compelling challenge that we think smart technologies and a smart city strategy can help us address," said Rod Regier, the region's commissioner of planning and development.

"It has to have a material impact on our quality of life at the end of the day," he said.

Putting together a proposal is a huge amount of work, and the seven municipalities in the region will share in the work, said Regier.

"Your project needs to be led by the community and address real challenges. You cannot have solutions looking for a problem," he said.

All cities, regardless of size, can compete for the $50 million prize. There are two prizes of $10 million each open to cities with fewer than 500,000 people. There is one prize of up to $5 million for towns with fewer than 30,000 people.

Locally, there is no shortage of ideas, from Wi-Fi on public transit, to universal access to inexpensive, high-capacity internet connections, said Kitchener Mayor Berry Vrbanovic.

Last week, Kitchener opened an innovation lab in the Communitech Hub, which Vrbanovic believes could play an important role in this region's application. As Kitchener installs LED lights equipped with transmitters to create a Wi-Fi network across the city, it will be able to test different technology and apps, he said.

"If you look at any of the successful applications that happened in the States, Columbus and Austin and so on, they have been ones that significantly engaged the community," said Vrbanovic. "That is something we are going to need to undertake."