Managing Climate Change by Managing Stakeholders? Information Processing in Urban Innovation

Abstract

Urban renewal is increasing in relevance, mainly due to the need to address climate change. In pursuit of this goal, urban innovations target the development and implementation of collectively used infrastructures and resources in cities, like smart city solutions. These endeavors require the involvement of stakeholders to identify their needs and to garner their active support in urban environments. As a result, urban innovation projects can implement concrete solutions for ecological sustainability in local ecosystems that display multiple and frequent conflicting interests. Our study draws on stakeholder theory to investigate how the breadth of stakeholder involvement (the number of different stakeholder groups) and the depth of stakeholder involvement (the collaboration intensity with external stakeholders during the early innovation phase) affect the implementation orientation of urban innovation projects. Building on the perspective of information processing theory, we suggest that the efficacy of stakeholder involvement depends on the use of digital involvement and formalization tools. To explore these relationships, we analyze 106 urban innovation projects for energy efficiency improvements in urban districts. We use a text mining analysis of planning documents to assess the implementation orientation of targeted innovations and survey data to measure the independent variables. The results provide empirical evidence that (i) a broad involvement of stakeholders affects urban innovations’ implementation negatively, but a deep stakeholder involvement has the opposite effect, and that (ii) intensive use of digital involvement tools support stakeholder involvement, while (iii) a high degree of IT supported project formalization weakens the positive effect of stakeholder involvement intensity on the implementation orientation.