Innovating and Exploiting Entrepreneurial Opportunities in Smart Cities: Evidence from Germany

Abstract

Smart City initiatives are considered a vehicle for achieving sustainable development of urban growth. This paper explores the conditions and factors that affect innovation in Smart Cities from an entrepreneurial vantage point. Data was obtained through a series of interviews with German entrepreneurs active in Smart Cities. Beyond examining the importance of a set of factors that originate from the extant literature, our findings suggest that entrepreneurs believe that Smart City initiatives need a clear vision to drive their development and growth and that government has a key role to play in bringing the necessary resources and stakeholders together.

Smart Cities as Organizational Fields: A Framework for Mapping Sustainability-Enabling Configurations

“…This line of research converges with the steadily growing attention to local entrepreneurship as the core engine of viable smart innovation [21,[64][65][66][67][68], because entrepreneurs can (re)build new tailored business models that fit a specific city's needs and conditions. However, a higher-level vision of the city's sustainable future is needed to orient entrepreneurs' efforts, and the government plays an often irreplaceable role in providing this vision, bringing the necessary resources and facilitating the interactions between the relevant actors that are expected to contribute to smart city initiatives [15]. The citizens should be actively involved in these collaborative interactions, because users' appreciation of, and commitment to, urban change is almost always essential to smart initiatives' success [63].…”

“…On the other hand, the smart city idea nurtures a vast global movement, advocated by highly reputed corporations and consulting firms [18]. In addition, smart city initiatives are also strongly encouraged by government funding and/or competitive grants, especially in the European Union, but also in the United States and almost all the most important countries worldwide [15]. Going "smart" is perceived as highly fashionable in the political arena and leaders feel that launching smart initiatives is an important factor to attract investments and talents, especially in the high-tech sectors.…”

“…The smart city idea has much in common with the sustainable city movement [14], but is characterized by a particular focus on technology-enabled innovation as the key means to achieve sustainability. Therefore, entrepreneurship is expected to play a pivotal role in smart city initiatives [15,16], since new opportunities must be discovered, and new business models must be developed [17], for the smart city idea to translate into practice.…”

Designing radical innovations of meanings for society: Envisioning new scenarios for smart mobility

“…Digital technologies provide incredible opportunities to citizens in terms of real-time planning, open traffic data, social customer services, etc. At the same time, to effectively create value, these opportunities must meet the needs of emerging lifestyles (Kraus, Richter, Papagiannidis, & Durst, 2015;Verganti, 2009).…”

An Introduction to the Field of Technology Entrepreneurship: Editorial to the Special Issue

“…They find evidence for such differences and argue that science communication needs to be improved to align expectations. Richter, Papagiannidis, Kraus and Durst (2015) position their paper at the regional level of analysis when they ask which characteristics of smart cities impact on the activities of technology entrepreneurs. They position their paper in the knowledge spillover and social capital theories when they suggested that the Smart City would be a favourable location for entrepreneurs.…”