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The 21st century has started as very challenging period for the whole world. Facing such major challenges require appropriate strategy and tolls to fight them. In that light EU aims to recognize structural weaknesses and employ tools overcome them in foreseeable period. The Commission has adopted a number a documents containing comprehensive strategy for acting in the actual period. Part of such efforts is the concept of smart specialization as a way to achieve main strategy goals. In that frames, national/regional research and innovation strategies for smart specialization (RIS3) are needed to be developed and employed. This paper presents the achievements in creating S3 based on electro-mechanical industry sector in the period of time 2021-2023. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of smart cities is an area of great strategic relevance. However, it has received scant attention in the literature. This study seeks to enrich literature by providing survey evidence related to the role of private sector in building up smart cities in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Interestingly, the UAE has been making incessant efforts to transform its cities by using smart technologies with astonishing speed. Empirical evidence gathered through a survey exercise indicates that smart human capital development and smart Management Information System have positive effect on competitiveness and sustainability of living conditions. Smart performance indicators have positive effect on sustainability. Further, strategic planning has very strong direct positive effect on smart performance indicators. However, the SEM model used in this study shows insignificant relationship between smart performance indicators and competitiveness. It also reveals insignificant relationship between strategic planning on one hand, and smart human capital development and Smart MIS on the other. The relationships revealed in this study would be of interest to decision makers in the UAE and elsewhere in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smart city projects require complex coordination of resources, but research on how capabilities form at the city-ecosystem level remains scarce. This article develops a multi-level approach to capability development in smart city ecosystems through an empirical study of London's city data. We analyse the London case to discover how two ecosystem-level capabilities – data provisioning and data insights – developed through global, configural and shared aggregation processes. We find that the emergence process changes as the smart city ecosystem develops, requiring different coordination and resource mobilisation mechanisms at various stages. We contribute to the capability development and smart city literatures by focusing on ecosystem-level capabilities linked to collective city-level outcomes rather than the capabilities of the leading city authority. Insights from the study are of value to city authorities considering how to scale up and organise smart city initiatives in support of urban development goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of digital technologies provides an opportunity to study smart cities as new organizational forms. We ask whether and how digital platforms and ecosystems affect the bureaucratic governance of municipal governments. To this end, we offer a multiple case analysis based on rich empirical, longitudinal data of seven European smart cities. We find that the contradicting logic of platform governance creates organizational tensions within the bureaucratic municipal government and at the interface between the municipal government and its external partners. We distil a process that describes how these tensions are resolved through a temporary shift to a non-bureaucratic work mode, and the subsequent formalization and institutionalization of those practices as new bureaucratic rules. We make three contributions. First, we contribute to the smart-city literature by outlining an overarching process of how data-driven technologies affect bureaucratic municipal governments. Second, we contribute to the ongoing conversation about the changing nature of Weberian bureaucracy showing how bureaucracy preserves its core while simultaneously adapting to and shaping its environment. Third, we highlight the role of lower-echelon bureaucrats as change agents who devise rules at the intersection of technological and societal development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore smart city development, with a focus on the modalities of citizen participation, using an institutional logics approach. Taking Mexico City as our case study, we describe the presence and dynamics of several logics influencing smart city development. At an organizational level we identify the bureaucratic and technocratic logics underpinning the practices of the governmental agency leading smart city development. Characterized by centralization and the pursuit of efficiency, and framed by a discourse of austerity and financial control, these logics promote a modality of citizen participation that is limited and unidirectional in nature, with citizens positioned largely as users. At a supra-organizational level, we identify a logic of active citizen participation in urban governance that is formalized in city laws. However, this logic is itself entangled in a logic of clientelism and patronage, manifested through networks of power. These logics work synergistically to limit broader, inclusive citizen participation in, and realization of benefits from, smart city agendas. We conclude that a richer understanding of institutional logics enhances the analysis of the social construction of the smart city in particular, situated contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To accommodate the need for community engagement and place-based approaches in smart city agendas in Africa, we build on the literature on smart cities, southern urbanism and the urban commons to develop a conceptual framework for urban commoning in Africa. We argue that commoning, as an organizing process, establishes institutions for urban commons that account for different urban dwellers' needs, perspectives and knowledges thereby strengthening inclusion and producing knowledge-intensive smart city development. We explain how the proposed conceptual framework is particularly suited to the African context, as it can mitigate the formal-informal divide and enable marginalized citizens to meaningfully express their right to the city. By enabling citizens' voice in planning and distributing urban resources, commoning helps redefine local bureaucracies, rendering them more open and inclusive while limiting the enclosure and marketization of cities, which is often a source of contestation in the development of smart cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we take a city's budget, which represents the resources that need to be allocated, and test how many blockchain users need to join a voting process of how the city's resources should be allocated in order to best represent their preferences. This voting process can be tracked very well through the utilization of IoT and smart technology in a smart city. Therefore, we showed that the budget resource allocation of a smart city can be significantly optimized through the utilization of blockchain technology. We found that just a tiny fraction of 0.12% of the population of blockchain participants is needed to significantly represent the spending behavior of the total population. This has significant implications as it shows the strength and importance of a required blockchain in a smart city and its minimal energy consumption requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of smart public governance (SPG) is gaining attention among researchers, policymakers, and practitioners around the world, especially in response to the modernisation of public administration through emerging technologies in both local (smart city) and national (smart government) levels. Spurred by the noticeable lack of understanding of the SPG concept, the paper aims to comprehensively examine the SPG research by considering the characteristic differences between the smart city and smart government concepts. Bibliometric analysis is based on the Scopus database, containing 775 documents published in the last two decades and facilitated by several established and innovative bibliometric approaches. The results reveal the growth of SPG research over time. Despite the smart city concept being the dominant focus in the SPG research, the smart government concept has been becoming more relevant in recent years, as indicated by some prominent documents published in reputable journals like Government Information Quarterly. Moreover, Anglo-Saxon countries are chiefly engaged in SPG research. However, New Zealand and South Korea are identified as countries with a stronger focus on the smart government concept. The results show the smart city concept is connected with several smart-related initiatives (e.g., smart transportation, smart living, smart energy, etc.), while the smart government concept is primarily associated with smart (de)regulation and smart grid. The findings may add to the understanding of the future development of SPG research, on both local and national levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(1) Background: Regional Innovation Strategies on Smart Specialisation (RIS3) receive higher attention due to the start of the new European funding period 2021–2027. Compared to the previous period, RIS3 will focus more attention towards social needs and challenges in their design and implementation to commit themselves towards sustainable regional development and contribute to the European Green Deal and UN Sustainable Development Goals. Nevertheless, RIS3 as innovation policy has not yet incorporated social innovation concepts or socio-ecological demands on its pathway within the constant transition of Europe's society to become more sustainable. (2) Methods: A systematic literature review has been conducted to identify key insights and gaps in existing literature. (3) Results: The review exposed clustering as a policy tool for sustainable development, a lack of integration of social capital and regional assets to RIS3 design to overcome societal challenges and missing political capabilities to utilize social innovation governances under RIS3 towards sustainability. (4) Conclusions: Future research should pick up these gaps to contribute to a better understanding of social innovators in designing RIS3, meeting social needs and forging the pathway towards sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In the modern conditions of the post-COVID world, the transformation of the world economy in the framework of the transition to the post-industrial paradigm, and the economy of "knowledge", the national innovation system (NIS) plays a leading role in the formation of competitive sectors of any given country. Within this setting, the performance of the Russian innovation system significantly lags behind other countries and calls for modernisation based on the modern regulatory tools, policies, and world's leading trends. The direct import of institutions of foreign innovation systems demonstrates its limited effectiveness due to the incompleteness of institutions and mechanisms for regulating the institutional environment of the Russian economy. One of the generally recognised, leading, and the most "universal" instruments for implementing innovation policy by government institutions is the public procurement of innovation. The analysis of international experience shows that the implementation of the innovation policy via innovative public procurement has a highly heterogeneous landscape even in such a "cohesive" jurisdiction as those represented by the European Union (EU) as far as different types of policy dominate in different countries of the world. There is no clear trend towards the only one mainstream regulatory approach. In this context, the Russian experience demonstrates de facto the absence of any centralised, transparent, and effective policy expressed in such pseudo-innovative procurement as refuelling cartridges or car repairs. This paper identifies the existing institutional failures of the Russian NIS on the example of the regulation of innovative domestic procurement. It proposes ways to modernise the current policy based on the institutional and narrative approaches in order to foster its leading position in the international competition. This article shows the gaps in the literature in institutional governance of innovations and innovation procurement in Russia and points at directions for future research based on narrative economics. Outlining the present knowledge as a foundation for future research in institutional governance of innovations, this article holds implications for both academics and practitioners in the field of the innovation policies and public procurement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]