Innovation within digital territorial ecosystems : the case of smart cities

The use of information and communication technologies to develop services for optimizing urban networks (energy, water, transport ...) and develop new services such as urban mobility services is one of the most promising area of territorial innovations. This is the field of smart cities. But today, technologies are already available while services are facing important start up issues. The main obstacles are economic in nature. They result from the specific characteristics of innovation within digital ecosystems. The communication aims to identify these problems and to examine the role of public and private actors to solve problems of coordination raised by the complexity of ecosystems. First of all, the paper proposes a clarification of the concept of smart cities through a critical review of the literature. Then, it analyses the process of innovation within ecosystems of heterogeneous actors such as urban systems. Coordination problems cannot be solved by traditional industrial relationships such as forward or backward linkages. They required the development of an economic platform able to drive innovation up to the market. The literature on the economics of platform is used to provide some insights on the role and the characteristics of such platforms. Main issues are the selection of economic actors able to play this role and their business model. In the second part, this analytical framework is applied to the current emergence of smart cities services. First, we distinguish smart cities from smart grids while smart grids are generally presented as the first stage of development of smart cities. We show that there is no direct transitivity between smart grids and smart cities, due to the different nature od he two ecosystems. Then, we are considering the emergence of urban services based on contactless technology (Near Field Communication) currently developed through various urban experiments. We exmaine the players in the ecosystem, their roles and their ability to provide the economic platform of the ecosystem. We conclude that none of industrial players, private or public, has this capability. As a result, territories (local public authorities) appears as the only player able to build the frame of a cooperative innovation process. The example of new urban mobility services is taken to highlight the failure of market solutions and to define what could be the role of public policies for solving start up issues. More general conclusions are drawn from this example to redefine the policies of innovation in the context of complex ecosystems.