Abstract
Cities are increasingly expected to bring urban stakeholders together to deploy smart solutions that address urban challenges and deliver long-term positive impacts. Yet, existing theory and practice struggle to explain how such impacts can be achieved, measured or evidenced. This paper makes two major contributions. Firstly, the paper shows how the Quadruple Helix (QH) innovation approach can be used as the basis for co-producing smart city projects in order to better capture their impacts. In doing so we present a synthesis of current smart city and QH literatures to argue that assessment criteria and indicators must be co-produced with the full set of smart city stakeholders to ensure relevance to context and needs. Secondly, we present an example of a co-produced monitoring and assessment framework and methodology, developed to capture and measure the impacts of smart and sustainable city solutions with the stakeholder teams involved in the European Union Triangulum smart city programme. The paper draws on experiences working with 27 smart city demonstration projects involving public, private and third-sector organisations and communities across Manchester (United Kingdom), Eindhoven (The Netherlands) and Stavanger (Norway). We show how involving QH stakeholders in co-producing impact assessment improves the ability of projects to deliver and measure impacts that matter to cities and citizens. We conclude with a series of lessons and recommendations intended to be of use to the range of organisations and communities currently involved in smart city initiatives across Europe and the world.
Highlights
Cities around the world are pursuing smart, ICTenabled, ways to tackle a growing range of urban challenges (Gil-Garcia et al, 2016; Glasmeier and Nebiola, 2016; Karvonen et al, 2019; Martin et al, 2018a, 2018b) and improve governance, democracy, equality and decision-making (Meijer and Bolivar, 2016; Paskaleva and Cooper, 2017)
In doing so we provide a connection between Quadruple Helix (QH) innovation and impact assessment at the project level
By identifying how co-production can engage the QH in monitoring and assessment, this paper makes an important contribution to the challenge of developing locally embedded and effective smart city projects
Summary
Cities around the world are pursuing smart, ICTenabled, ways to tackle a growing range of urban challenges (Gil-Garcia et al, 2016; Glasmeier and Nebiola, 2016; Karvonen et al, 2019; Martin et al, 2018a, 2018b) and improve governance, democracy, equality and decision-making (Meijer and Bolivar, 2016; Paskaleva and Cooper, 2017). Based on captured and reported assessment of baseline, interim and final impacts of a project, a formative evaluation takes place, accounting for the process through which each project develops This is achieved through (a) identification of a set of metrics and monitoring procedures for each expected impact, (b) capturing of process factors relating to the working dynamics between the stakeholders, with a focus on stakeholder experiences and perceptions of the governance process in the QH (Greene, 1988), and (c) sustainability of data generation, monitoring and usage (Paskaleva et al, 2017)
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