Abstract
To date, research on smart cities has primarily focused on urban congested areas. As this paper points out, it is becoming ever more important to look at intermediate and thinly populated regions like towns and rural areas as arenas for digital innovation. By following a multi-phase research process, the authors examine towns’ highly individual needs in an exploratory way, derive key aspects from recent literature that can serve to mitigate or solve their problems, and present an open innovation process by way of integrating local context factors, local stakeholders, and suitable information and communication technology solutions. The objective is to develop a first digital innovation approach in a field that has so far been scarcely considered. The authors conduct a case study, which demonstrates the applicability and effectiveness of their innovation approach in a small town in southern Germany and derive first important lessons learned. Thereby, the concept of an innovation ecosystem reveals a promising solution to face the challenges of the investigated town.
Highlights
There is a need for improvements and extensions in the way information systems are applied in order to yield more successful and predictable innovation outcomes in towns, which is why this paper addresses the following research questions: RQ How should an innovation process be designed for 1 smart towns to better leverage the potential of digitalization? RQ To adhere to the individual needs of smart towns, 2 can information systems themselves enable townspecific innovations?
We follow a multi-phase research process (Fig. 1) inspired by design science research (Hevner 2007; Hevner et al 2004). It consists of three phases: (I) we consider justificatory knowledge of our problem domain and encounter ‘‘problem-adjusting factors’’ within the current scientific work on the subject, (II) we develop an innovation process to derive a suitable solution following an exploratory search process, and (III) we evaluate the applicability and effectiveness of the resulting innovation process by applying it to a small town
We apply the innovation process to a small town in southern Germany, a town mainly characterized by its strong dependency on tourism
Summary
By doing so we aim to better understand and examine how the different elements of open innovation could be used as a means of increasing innovativeness and to provide guidance when identifying digital innovations in the context of smart towns. We aimed to cover diverse roles and responsibilities that are central to the town at hand
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