190409 - Diffusion of Public Private Innovations in Smart/Digital Cities

 

General Seminar "Diffusion of Public Private Innovations in Smart/Digital Cities" (PDF, 33Ko)

Tuesday 9 April 2019, 12.30-2.30 pm, Sciences Po - Room Goguel, 27 rue Saint-Guillaume, 75007 Paris

 As global urbanization intensifies, local governments are under pressure to establish and maintain quality of life and public services for a rapidly increasing number of citizens. Popularly known as “smart city” solutions, municipalities have engaged with private partners in experimenting with pilot projects that use and develop new technologies, often digital. These smart/digital city solutions are examples of the phenomenon more generally known as public private innovation. During the past decade cities have created a large number of experimental initiatives: pilot projects, test beds, and urban living labs. However, the conditions under which these public private innovations (PPIs) manage to scale up from specific pilot projects to city-wide solutions remains largely unexplored. In an on-going paper with Lasse Bundgaard we analyze five conditions for scale up in 17 cases of ‘smart/digital city’ projects using a fsQCA approach. The findings show two possible combinations of conditions that lead to scale up, and show that high levels of Legitimacy is present in both combinations. These findings tend to indicate that the foreground of urban governance politics, where Legitimacy is key, is most relevant. This shows as well the unescapable spatiality of processes of inter-organizational change, as ‘smart/digital city’ solutions are highly embedded in the idiosyncrasies of urban governance.

Speaker: Susana Borrás, Copenhagen Business School

Susana Borrás is Professor at the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Denmark. She conducts research on the interaction between governance and innovation. As a social scientist focusing on public policy, her research interests are in the field of innovation policy. One of her leading questions is, what governments can do to foster socio-technical innovation in the economy, and how research and innovation policy can be designed to more problem-solving addressing grand challenges. Understanding that governmental action is embedded in a governance context, issues of market dynamics, social legitimacy, as well as organizational and analytical capacity are inescapable questions for transformative innovation.

Discussion: Antoine Courmont, Sciences Po, CEE & Urban School, Cities and Digital Technology Chair & Charlotte Halpern, Sciences Po, CEE

Contact : katia.rio@sciencespo.fr

 

Compulsory registration - For the external people to Sciences Po: You will have to arrive 10 minutes before the beginning of the seminar and to provide you with your identity papers