Smart regions. Two cases of crowdsourcing for regional development

Despite a certified need for stronger ties between regional entrepreneurial ecosystems and larger networks, and despite an emerging discourse on beneficial interlinks between crowdsourcing and urban development, the relationship between crowdsourcing and regional development is underexplored. Unlike the few existing reports on voluntary bottom-up crowdsourcing initiatives for regional development, the focus of the present article is on two cases of top-down initiatives of crowdsourcing for regional development launched by institutional actors in the Swiss Canton of Valais and the Italian autonomous province, South Tyrol. The results of a comparison of the two cases suggest consideration of the strength of regional ties as factors that undermine crowd wisdom and flow as well as exercising caution with quantitative idea selection processes, at least in the context of smaller regional crowdsourcing projects.