| Abstract |
In recent years, the concept and literature of 'smart cities' has focused attention on the relation between new technologies, the problem solving capacities of cities as ecosystems and the role of citizens, SMEs and design oriented professional focused on developing new solutions. In smart cities two approaches seem to be prevalent. One is technology pushed, top-down, and focuses on creating new products in order to fully exploit the possibilities of new technologies such as broadband networks. Many cities are in the process of developing digital strategies, often in alliance with larger IT firms, in order to create new future business models that underpin city life. The bottom-up approach perceives of cities as ecosystems for developing new city solutions, and uses the diversity and intelligence of these ecosystems to create user-driven innovations in open collaborative processes that generate added value. These are often referred to as 'living labs'. This paper aims at identifying the essential building blocks for the ecosystems that are required for a successful smart city that is able to link top-down efforts with a bottom-up approach. Following such a bottom-up approach, we start with a case study of an open data and smart city initiative in the Dutch city of Enschede in the context of the national initiatives on open data. It is based on document analysis and an interview with the open data officer in the selected city. The remainder of the paper analyses the approach followed by Enschede by considering the case from a governance, an IT, a societal as well as from a business perspective. Based on this study we come up with three categories of building blocks for ecosystems for innovative smart cities. |