Removing Barriers to Smart Innovation and Entrepreneurship

To enhance the quality of life in the city, the city government must take advantage of the clustering resource and knowledge that the area accumulates. Cities as the place of clustering citizens, private enterprise, social organisation, and higher education hubs may benefit from smart cities with open governments. City Government that embraces Open Smart City can fully harness the combination of human, social, cultural, economic, and environmental potential of a city. However, due to the differing decision-making process and the commitment to public service, city governments tend to have weaker innovative capabilities compared to private institutions. Thus, Ferraris et al. (2020) provide steps that the city government can take to enhance its innovative capabilities and support entrepreneurship in their smart city. 

It is pertinent that first off, city governments need to foster dialogue between different stakeholders to share vision and aligned objectives of the smart city concept. Next, the city must develop cross cutting and integrating smart city policies with a strong project management practice, this creates a formal rule, responsibility and communication system between smart city actors. To overcome financial constraint, the city government should be open to new business models that could mediate innovation.  This should be followed up by developing the culture of risk taking among the public employees by making room for experiments and having relevant and accurate data available. Lastly, to reinforce the innovation culture development, the city government should continuously provide training to improve the human resource technological capacity.   

Reference:

Ferraris, A., Santoro, G., & Pellicelli, A. C. (2020). “Openness” of public governments in smart cities: removing the barriers for innovation and entrepreneurship. International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, 16(4), 1259-1280.

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