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

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.