Driven by a boom in the collaborative economy, cities are emerging as platforms for open innovation. Under pressure from growing demand and economic restraints, cities are looking towards open innovation and new technologies to provide better services and infrastructure to improve citizens' quality of life and incentivise local innovation. By embracing open data, new internet technologies and sensors in urban transport and building infrastructure, cities are enabling access to real-time data on everything from energy efficiency and congestion to pollution and crime. As a result, their opportunities for connecting people and places with things are increasing and new open innovation systems are emerging.
High-profile EU programmes in Europe have recognised the importance of the smart city and open innovation, the standing of which has risen in the landscape of the future internet and Internet of Things domains. These are expected to form dense social interactions, connecting people, communities and institutions with technology and infrastructure, thus enabling them to co-produce the applications and services that people and cities need and aspire to.
Since 2010, through action-based, experimentally-driven research, more than 20 large-scale European initiatives have deployed smart city real-life piloting projects in over 60 cities across the continent. Through user-driven open innovation ecosystems, such as Living Labs, in urban areas and cross-border networks of cities, shared innovative open platforms have been created for smart cities' services making use of information generated by users or captured from sensors, stimulating demand based on next-generation access networks. Industry and citizens have been encouraged to become more creative; to develop more sustainable, sociallyaware and intelligent sensing services; to support the independent living and social interaction of elderly people; to develop smart neighbourhoods where media-based social interaction occurs; to develop smart streets and urban districts where new transportation and energy consumption behaviours develop; to develop smart squares where civic decisions are made; and to develop smart museums and parks where natural and cultural heritage feed learning.
City-led innovation ecosystems are emerging as a result alongside collaborative economy concepts such as crowdsourcing, big data, open data, open networks and open government. A number of cities with multiple projects are already champions: Manchester, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Helsinki and Athens. Others, large and small, have joined the club too, from Tirgu Mures (Romania) to Dublin (Ireland) and from Oulu (Finland) to Thermi (Greece). In the US, more than 40 cities are using open data portals to involve citizens and private firms in developing services that improve quality of life. Now we need to know more about the success of these initiatives.
Governance-related challenges have been identified as key to service co-production. But questions remain unanswered about how well-grounded approaches to governance can be exploited to develop efficient citizens-centred smart city services (Draetta and Labarthe, 2010; Cleland et al, 2012; Pallot et al, 2010). Critical factors include citizen participation and effective collaborative processes between stakeholders (Odendaal 2003; Paskaleva, 2011), leadership (Mooij 2003; Lam 2005), private/public partnerships (Giffinger et al 2007) and governance infrastructures (Johnston and Hanssen 2011), the latter allowing for collaboration, data exchange, service integration and communication.
Here, 'governance' deals with the organisation of the innovation eco-system as a whole as well as interactions between its constituent members, e.g. the commitments and responsibilities of members, financial arrangements for joint infrastructures, mutual arrangements in respect of using each other's technologies and services (Mulder et al 2008). A recent study on the challenges faced in the co-production of smart city services (Paskaleva et al, 2015) found that engaging stakeholders effectively and on a sustainable basis is a critical success factor for such projects. Management skills are crucial but the ability to enable cooperation amongst stakeholders, the structure of alliances and collaborative working under different jurisdictions are key factors too (Scholl et al 2009), for city services are smart when ICTs and future internet developments are successfully embedded in the urban social and cultural networks needed to generate intelligence necessary for wealth creation and the principles and standards by which citizens and communities are engaged in their governance (Deakin 2014). So eco-systems and their governance have to be critically examined and evaluated.
The editorial of a special 2014 issue of Public Management Review on Innovation in Public Services (Osborne et al 2014) argued that co-production is central to the realisation of effective public services and that public service delivery should be treated as relational and process-based rather than transactional and product-based, to create externally, end-user-driven development predicated upon service effectiveness and public value. A subsequent volume on Co-production and Public Services (Radnor et al 2014) signalled that for public services to move away from product-dominant logic towards a service approach, they will have to adopt an inter-organisational approach with the role of the service user as a co-producer, starting from the design of the service. In neither volume was there an emphasis on evaluation of the effectiveness of this process or its resulting services.
This is the starting point of this new call for papers, which is focused on implementation and assessment as critical to the management of open innovation in the field of smart city services. Authors are encouraged to consider co-production of services in the smart city in the context of both our theoretical understanding and our practical experience of how such governance works. We aim to
- uncover unique perspectives on the role of governance in smart cities as platforms for open innovation
- further debate on smart city governance by focusing on stakeholder relations, skills, knowledge and capacity as the basis for the co-production of smart city services
- seek empirical verification of successful governance strategies for smart city services.
In short, reflecting on the state of the art of service governance and its implementation in coproduction, the issue aims to show what has and hasn't worked in smart cities. Authors will be invited to identify the success criteria needed for establishing the proven case for a governance approach to services creation. High-quality submissions are invited that are practice-based, reflective, critical and empirically-grounded and/or theoretically informed and aspirational and predictive about future directions.
Successful submissions should contain
- a clear indication of which specific question(s) raised in this call for papers will be addressed
- Evidence of what has and hasn't worked
- Articulation of the assessment regimes and success criteria needed to evaluate the efficacy of the governance approach
- The theoretical underpinning and conceptual frameworks necessary for robust research designs for undertaking such evaluations
- Specification of the range of stakeholders who need to be involved in such evaluation, the roles they will need to play, and the skill sets they need to operate effectively.
Smart city service innovation and governance crosses both academic and practitioner disciplinary boundaries so we encourage papers that cross these.
Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
- The production and distribution of new governance processes, lifecycles and methods for service co-production and innovation; using a integration of top-down and bottom-up (middling out) approaches to understand what people want, need and wish for, aimed at identifying key service value drivers
- Involvement of stakeholders through user-driven innovation and collaborative design and leveraging these processes to achieve desired outcomes
- Capacity building for urban communities to enable them to engage effectively in the co-production of smart city services
- Successful integration of technology with social innovation to design innovative smart city services with robust governance foundations
- The impact of the transformation of organisational and institutional arrangements on service co-production
- Assessment of the impacts in terms of marginal value creation of smart city services and their accompanying governance models
- Measurement of good governance for smart city service innovation
- Policy innovation perspectives
- The connected co-productive intelligence
- The design of assessment frameworks aimed at evaluating city services' smartness both in terms of governance readiness and outcome generation
Important Dates
Submission of full papers: 30 April, 2016
References
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Deakin, M. (2014). Smart cities: the state-of-the-art and governance challenge, Triple Helix, 1:7.
Deakin, M. and Allwinkle, S. (2007). Urban regeneration and sustainable communities: The role of networks, innovation, and creativity in building successful partnerships, Journal of Urban Technology, 14, 1, p. 77-91.
EC (2014). Digital Agenda for Europe. Open Innovation 2.0: Sustainable Economy & Society-Stability. Jobs. Prosperity, Dublin Ireland, 20/05- 21/05. Retrieved from http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/news/open-innovation-2.0-sustainable-economy-society-stability-jobs-prosperity.
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Paskaleva, K. and Cooper, I. (2014). Open innovation evaluation for Internet-enabled services in smart cities, Paper submitted to Technovation, Special Issue: Evaluating and managing technology and innovation in the public sector.
Pallot, M., Trousse, B., Senach, B. and Scapin, D. (2010) Living Lab research landscape: From user centred design and user experience towards user cocreation. First EU Summer School 'Living Labs'.
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