Track 4.4 - Regional Innovation Ecosystems: Issues for (from) Smart Cities

Didier CHABAUD, Prof., IAE Paris Sorbonne Business School
Florent PRATLONG, Assistant Prof., U. Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne 
Carlos MORENO, Ass. Prof., IAE Paris Sorbonne Business School

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Track's Contacts : 

chabaud.iae[AT]univ-paris1.fr
Florent.Pratlong[AT]univ-paris1.fr

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Smart City (SC) is a pathbreaking issue for everyone looking at cities and regions. Mayors, and their international associations (C40 Cities, Metropolis) put Smart City initiatives on their agenda, cities experiment new ways, and even claim the label of “smart city”. International prizes arise in a lot of countries. IT and consulting firms realize reports on the topic, propose business offers for metropoles and even create business units.

Smart city refers to the connection between ICT and the design and management of cities in order to enhance the quality of life of citizens (Dameri & Cocchia, 2013, European Parliament, 2014, Almirall et al., 2016). Beyond this apparent simplicity, there are inconsistencies in the meaning and content of Smart city (Dameri, 2013, Bibri & Krogstie, 2017). Innovation is at the heart of the smart city (Cohen et al., 2016), and it leads to renew every dimension of the city: public infrastructure (buildings, street furniture, network infrastructure, home automation, etc.); networks (water, electricity, gas, telecoms); transport (public transport, roads and smart cars, carpooling, soft mobility); governance (citizenship, e-services, e-administration); sustainability (reduction of pollution, energy efficiency, waste management, air quality); standard of living (health, housing, security, cost of living). For every dimension, the issues of design, implementation, governance and management are central.

However, one scholar looking at literature on smart city can be puzzled. Looking in EBSCO of WoS, the issue of « Smart City » seems rather absent in management sciences. Very few special issues of journals in management address this topic, and few papers exist (Ben Letaifa, 2015, Ingwersen & Serrano-Lopez, 2018). It seems that smart city is much more appealing for engineering and urbanism or geography than management sciences. This is puzzling, as smart cities lead to a lot of issues that are at the core of R&D management.

This track wants to develop the knowledge around this issue, and propose to treat three dimensions that are at the core of it:

- Designing Smart City: SC enforces the triple bottom line; imagining both citizen experience, by providing services, enhancing quality of life, and changing the citizen participation.
- Implementing Smart City: SC renews management of cities. It leads to issues of innovation management in the context of cities and metropoles, which need to address

o (1) How to renew cities and innovate, within a context of value creation taking into account economic, social and ecological value;
o (2) How to manage smart city projects, from experimenting to scaling-up.

- Business models for Smart City: SC use digital technologies (IT, IoT, IA) and promotes new services and servitization, opening way for opportunities and new business models.

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References

ALMIRALL E., WAREHAM J., RATTI C., CONESA P., BRIA F., GRAVARIA A. and A. EDMONDSON (2016). Smart Cities at the Crossroads: New Tensions in City Transformation, California Management Review, 59(1), 141-152.
BEN LETAIFA, S. (2015). How to strategize smart cities: Revealing the SMART model. Journal of Business Research, 68(7), 1414–1419
BIBRI, S. E. & KROGSTIE, J. (2017), Smart sustainable cities of the future: an extensive interdisciplinary literature review, Journal of Sustainable Cities and Society, 31, 183-212.
COHEN, B., ALMIRALL, E.; CHESBROUGH, H. (2016), The City as a Lab: Open Innovation Meets the Collaborative Economy, California Management Review, 59, 5–13.
BULU M. (2014), Upgrading a city via technology, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, 89, 63–67.
COCCHIA, A. (2014), Smart and Digital City: A Systematic Literature Review, In Dameri, R.P., & Sabroux, C. (eds), Smart City: How to Create Public and Economic Value with High Technology in Urban Space, Springer, p. 13-43.
DAMERI R.P. (2013), Searching for Smart City definition: a comprehensive proposal, International Journal of Computers & Technology, 11(5), 2544-2551.
DAMERI, R. P. & BENEVOLO, C. (2016), Governing Smart Cities: An Empirical Analysis. Social Science Computer Review, 34(6), 693–707.
DAMERI, R. P. & COCCHIA, A. (2013), Smart city and digital city: Twenty years of terminology evolution. Proceedings of X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS, ITAIS, 1–8.
EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT (2014), Mapping Smart Cities in the EU. Study. Policy Department A: Economic and Scientific Policy, European Parliament, Brussels.
INGWERSEN, P. & SERRANO-LÓPEZ, A.E (2018), Smart city research 1990–2016, Scientometrics (2018) 117: 1205.
KOURTIT K., NIJKAMP P. & ARRIBAS D. (2012), Smart cities in perspective – a comparative European study by means of selforganizing maps, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 25(2), 229-246.
MELLOULLI S., LUNA-REYES L.F. and J. ZHANG (2014), Smart government, citizen participation and open data, Information Polity, 19(1-2), 1–4.
MORA, L., BOLICI, R., & DEAKIN, M. (2017). The first two decades of smart-city research: A bibliometric analysis. Journal of Urban Technology, 24(1), 3–27.
MORA, L., DEAKIN, M., & REID, A. (2018). Combining co-citation clustering and text-based analysis to reveal the main development paths of smart cities. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Forthcoming.
RUHLANDT, R.W.S. (2018), The governance of smart cities: A systematic literature review, Cities, forthcoming.
VESCO A. & F. FERRERO (2015), Handbook of Research on Social, Economic, and Environmental Sustainability in the Development of Smart Cities. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

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