“Openness” of public governments in smart cities: removing the barriers for innovation and entrepreneurship

Open innovation practices have been found to positively affect innovation and entrepreneurship due to the complementarities and uniqueness of resources and knowledge provided by each organization. Today, this approach may be even more important in the so called “smart cities”, where different private and public stakeholders cooperate to co-design and co-develop new cutting edge products and services aimed to create shared value through entrepreneurial behaviors. However, concrete examples of smart city projects revealed that public governments often do not have the necessary capabilities as well as innovative approaches to collaborate with companies and other stakeholders’ ecosystems. So, this paper aims at analyzing (open) innovation in public governments shedding lights on the barriers and challenges that public governments face in smart city development. The study uses primary data gathered through interviews from multiple smart city stakeholders to highlight how public governments should operate in the smart city context to overcome barriers and challenges, and to favor an entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystem as well as public-private collaborations. These barriers are related to: lack of rules; as all the others tasks and responsibility; scarce integrated view of the city planning; lack of fit of administrative styles & interdepartmental coordination and communication; risk adversity; data availability; disincentives & non flexible public procurement rules; lack of resources; lack of technological capabilities. Moreover, the study provides contributions for different and interrelated streams of research, in particular developing several implications in the field of entrepreneurship and smart city.