Ecosystems for smart cities: tracing the evolution of governance structures in a dutch smart city initiative
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Ecosystems for smart cities: tracing the evolution of governance structures in a dutch smart city initiative Ward Ooms 1 & Marjolein C. J. Caniëls 1 Dieudonnee Cobben 1
& Nadine
Roijakkers 1 &
# The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Smart cities use integrated information and communication technology in order to help their citizens and organizations deal with the challenges of urbanization, safety, and sustainability. Smart cities need complex forms of governance involving a great variety of actors. The aim of this study is to illustrate how elements of governance structures in smart city ecosystems evolve over time, and to understand in which way these elements enable or inhibit the success of such ecosystems in different phases of evolution. We draw on the ecosystem literature and the smart city literature to identify governance aspects relevant to projects with multiple stakeholders. We illustrate our framework with extensive empirical evidence from an in-depth single case study of a smart city initiative in The Netherlands. We find that the use of specific governance elements varies across the phases of evolution of the smart city ecosystem. In the initiation phase, governance structures aimed at strengthening the internal relations are key. In this phase, elements such as trust, commitment, and common goals are important as they help to create a common ground. In the growth phase, the ecosystem focuses on establishing external relations with other parties, such as competitors and suppliers. In this phase, governance elements such a co-creation strategy and a dedicated organization for promotion gain importance, as these elements facilitate communication with external parties. Keywords Smart city . Governance structures . Ecosystem . Evolution
Acknowledgements: Our study partly draws on interview data gathered for: Cobben, D., & Roijakkers, N. (2019). The Dynamics of Trust and Control in Innovation Ecosystems. International Journal of Innovation: IJI Journal, 7(1), 1-25. For the current study new data has been added and the total dataset was recoded and reanalyzed on aspects that are relevant for the current study.
* Marjolein C. J. Caniëls [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal
Introduction The interest in smart city development is growing (Komninos and Mora 2018). Studies exploring the phenomenon broadly clarify that their interest follows from strong global trends of urbanization that pose challenges to growing cities in terms of ensuring continued safety, efficiency, and sustainability (e.g. Lee et al. 2014; Girardi and Temporelli 2017). The smart city concept is seen as a way to facilitate and satisfy citizens’, companies’, and organizations’ needs in this regard, by using integrated information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Girardi and Temporelli 2017). Current knowledge about smart city development is dispersed across different literatures, such as the ecosystem literature (e.g. Cobben and
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