An Integrative Collaborative Ecosystem for Smart Cities — A Framework for Organizational Governance

ABSTRACT

Currently, the prevailing trend of urbanization threatens to overcrowd the world’s cities in the upcoming years thus fostering the conceptualization of ‘smart city’ policies to increase their capacities for housing and supplying their citizens. This study reviews previous approaches modelling cities as collaborative ecosystems and combines the various societal, economic, and technological interactions of its stakeholders to an integrated notion of collaborative SC ecosystems. By reviewing the results of the relevant literature, these studies show parallels between Smart Cities and open innovation ecosystems. Based on these findings, the study defines a Smart City as an urban innovation ecosystem following a quadruple-helix structure. By investigating the applicability of governance instruments and digital technologies, it becomes apparent that smart technologies provide the opportunity to program a governance mechanism into the algorithmic structure of SC software thus giving birth to governance by smart technologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart city
• business ecosystem
• governance
• technological governance
• framework

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Declaration of Submission Uniqueness

We confirm that this manuscript has not been published elsewhere and is not under consideration by another journal. All authors have approved the manuscript and agree with its submission to the “International Journal of Public Administration”.

Additional information

Funding

This research study as a part of the research project “Wissens- und Ideentransfer für Innovation in der Verwaltung” (WITI) was funded by the Research Initiative “Innovative Hochschule” of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Grant No.: 03IHS041A).