Smart city as urban innovation

This paper aims to fill the research gap by building a comprehensive framework to view the smart city movement as innovation comprised of technology, management and policy.

Abstract

This paper sees a smart city not as a status of how smart a city is but as a city's effort to make itself smart. The connotation of a smart city represents city innovation in management and policy as well as technology. Since the unique context of each city shapes the technological, organizational and policy aspects of that city, a smart city can be considered a contextualized interplay among technological innovation, managerial and organizational innovation, and policy innovation. However, only little research discusses innovation in management and policy while the literature of technology innovation is abundant. This paper aims to fill the research gap by building a comprehensive framework to view the smart city movement as innovation comprised of technology, management and policy. We also discuss inevitable risks from innovation, strategies to innovate while avoiding risks, and contexts underlying innovation and risks.