Purpose\ud – Contemporary debate is increasingly focused on ICT and sustainability, especially in relation to the modern configuration of urban and metropolitan areas in the so-called smartization process. The purpose of this paper is to observe the connections between smart city features as conceptualized in the framework proposed by Giffinger et al. (2007) and new technologies as tools, and sustainability as the goal.\ud \ud Design/methodology/approach\ud – The connections are identified through a content analysis performed using NVivo on official reports issued by organizations, known as industry players within smart city projects, listed in the Navigant Research Report 2013.\ud \ud Findings\ud – The results frame ICT and sustainability as “across-the-board elements” because they connect with all of the services provided to communities in a smart city and play a key role in smart city planning. Specifically, sustainability and ICT can be seen as tools to enable the smartization process.\ud \ud Research limitations/implications\ud – An all-in-one perspective emerges by embedding sustainability and ICT in smart interventions; further research could be conduct through direct interviews to city managers and industry players in order to understand their attitude towards the development of smart city projects.\ud \ud Practical implications\ud – Potential approaches emerging from this research are useful to city managers or large corporations partnering with local agencies in order to increase the opportunities for the long-term success of smart projects.\ud \ud Originality/value\ud – The results of this paper delineate a new research path looking at the development of new models that integrate drivers, ICT, and sustainability in an all-in-one perspective and new indicators for the evaluation of the interventions

Purpose The wider possibility of connectivity offers additional opportunities for customers to experience value propositions. The online world is only one side of the customer experience. The integration of digital technologies, social presence and physical elements increases the complexity of customer journey. This paper aims to map the phygital customer journey by focusing on millennials. Design/methodology/approach The study adopted a qualitative methodology to investigate 50 millennials from Italy. Millennials had to describe, in two phases, a journey they had recently made. First, they used sticky notes with no restrictions on expressing their feelings and structuring their CJ. Second, customers transferred the sticky notes’ contents, consider the information provided and map the journey with additional details using the Uxpressia software. Findings This paper frames the Millennials customer journey as a cycle of four moments: connect, explore, buy and use. Each moment enacts the customer experience as a mixture of emotional, behavioural and social responses. Online and offline interactions blur the boundaries between the physical and digital world (i.e. phygital): millennials move back-and-forth or jump from one action to another according to the evolving path of emotions and interactions. Originality/value The phygital customer journey provides an alternative understanding of customer journey occurring as a fuzzy process or loop. A phygital map develops as a circular path of moments seen as phenomenological microworlds of events, interactions, relationships and emotions.

Our purpose is to identify the relevance of participative governance in urban areas characterized by smart cities projects, especially those implementing Living Labs initiatives as real-life settings to develop services innovation and enhance engagement of all urban stakeholders.A research on the three top smart cities in Europe -i.e. Amsterdam, Barcelona and Helsinki -is proposed through a content analysis with NVivo on the offi cial documents issued by the project partners (2012)(2013)(2014)(2015) to investigate their Living Lab initiatives.The results show the increasing usefulness of Living Labs for the development of more inclusive smart cities projects in which public and private actors, and people, collaborate in innovation processes and governance for the co-creation of new services, underlining the importance of the open and ecosystem-oriented approach for smart cities.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the role of technology as it has been framed within Innovation System (IS) and Innovation Ecosystem (IE) literature research streams. The methodological choice is a systemic review that allows to focus on theoretical proposals by scholars and the identification of the commonalities regarding the pivotal role of technology and the differences in describing innovation-based mechanisms in both literatures. Results show that the key elements are the overall idea of technology as pivotal in driving innovation, the actors affecting technology and contributing to reach innovation-based goals, and the decisional process emerging because of technology. Furthermore, emerging features on evolution through time and knowledge-transforming mechanisms favored by technology in IE show an opportunity to learn in-depth from specific insights generated in both the literatures and to delineate a more comprehensive approach to technology related to innovation in wider interconnected contexts.

Through a design science approach, the paper explores how actors in a network create and sustain competitive advantage independently and through participation in a system of actors (i.e., a collaborative network) who are not hierarchically managed but, rather, act toward their own goals within the innovation ecosystem. In accordance with design studies, the relevance of research and its quality are evaluated against practice. The two cases discussed in the paper highlight that, in practice, innovation ecosystem actors must manage activities and relationships at the level of both individual and organisation. This finding has interesting research implications, as innovation ecosystems have been studied mostly at either macro or interpersonal (micro) level while the organisation (meso) level is seldom discussed. Furthermore, the findings should help managers to strive for and utilise innovation ecosystems better and to evaluate their ability and potential to survive via internal and external collaboration aimed at innovation.