Crowdsourcing as an Open Innovation Strategy in Knowledge-Based Smart City Management

Abstract

A smart city is defined as an area that offers numerous opportunities for learning and innovation, relies on the creative potential of its inhabitants and institutions, and employs digital infrastructure for communicating and managing knowledge. An important related research direction to be considered is knowledge management for smart cities and urban innovation. The idea in this area is to collect and share knowledge in order to arrive at a collaborative approach towards the development of future urban environments. Open innovation is a new paradigm for building smart cities, where governments and software developers take advantage of the experience, skills, and knowledge of citizens to develop digital services that are relevant to users of the urban environment. Citizen involvement is a key to the successful development of cities, but empirical research into the nature and characteristics of this involvement remains scarce. The objective of this study is to explore the potential of open innovation strategies in knowledge-based smart city management and the role of the municipality herein. A limited set of crowdsourcing initiatives has been introduced to illustrate the open innovation strategies. This paper will tackle a part of this problem by adding to the understanding of generating, evaluating and selecting innovative ideas for smart city innovation by means of online crowdsourcing. The case studies research presented in this paper generates some empirical evidence with regards to the usage of crowdsourcing through an online platform in the context of trying to establish a smarter city. The study offers recommendations arising from the empirical research. An improved approach should consider citizens as active actors within the development process of smart cities. Citizens can collaborate in co-creating smart cities together with the private sector, governments, academia and knowledge institutes. One important element however still needs to be researched more in depth is user motivation. It remains an interesting research topic for future studies to investigate the optimal motivation for citizens in order to get them to share their knowledge.