Government-university collaboration on smart city and smart government projects: What are the success factors?

Abstract

Despite the widespread practice of cooperation between governments and universities on smart city and smart government projects, the factors influencing this cooperation are not well known. We explore government-university collaboration to illuminate four potential determinants of success in such projects: output, institutional, relationship, and framework factors. Using mixed methods, including a theoretically informed crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis methodology and thematic analysis of interviews and secondary data, we identify the causal relationships among these determinants and perceived success of government-university collaboration on smart city and smart government projects. We find that for a collaboration to be considered successful, all of these factors must be present and positive. In contrast, a negative assessment of even one of these factors is sufficient to evaluate the collaboration as unsuccessful.