Correspondence: silvia.sedita@unipd.it

Summary of the Session’s Theme and Objectives

This special session  critically re-examines the notion of innovation ecosystems in the context of smart city development. While the term is widely invoked to describe collaborative environments driving urban innovation, its practical configuration remains under-theorized and often reduced to idealized models of cross-sector partnership – for example, quadruple-helix models of stakeholder engagement. This session foregrounds the need for deeper investigation into the dynamics, dilemmas, and adaptive complexities that shape smart city innovation ecosystems in real-world settings.
Building on emerging scholarship that challenges linear, sector-based collaboration models, this session invites contributions that explore how diverse actors—public agencies, private firms, civil society, and hybrid organizations—assemble, interact, and evolve across the lifecycle of urban innovation initiatives. Emphasis is placed on procedural flexibility, actor heterogeneity, and the socio-political embeddedness of collaborative arrangements. We seek to interrogate how such ecosystems can more effectively co-create public value, address urban inequalities, and sustain innovation over time.
By focusing on the organizational and governance architectures of smart city innovation ecosystems, this session aims to advance a more context-sensitive and critical research agenda. It will facilitate interdisciplinary exchange on how to reconfigure

List of Topics to Be Presented in the Special Session

• Theorizing innovation ecosystems beyond helix models: Moving from triple/quadruple helix frameworks to more fluid and situated understandings of collaboration in urban contexts.
• Adaptive collaboration and ecosystem Evolution: Exploring how actor configurations and relationships shift across project stages (e.g., ideation, piloting, scaling).
• Multiplicity and interdependence in ecosystem actors: Analyzing the diverse roles, abilities, and positionalities of ecosystem members, including local vs. global, formal vs. informal actors.
• Power, governance, and institutional complexity: Examining how governance logics, power asymmetries, and institutional misalignments affect innovation outcomes.
• Place-based ecosystem design: Case studies on how context-specific strategies shape the emergence, sustainability.
• Failures, frictions, and trade-offs: Critical case studies that expose the limits of current collaborative models and suggest alternative pathways for inclusive and adaptive ecosystem governance.
• Ecosystem performance: Identifying new conceptual and methodological approaches to assess to what extent and how smart city innovation ecosystems deliver public goods.
• Spaces of innovation: Investigating the role of collaborative environments – such as Living Labs, innovation hubs, hackathons, and urban labs – as enabling infrastructures within smart city innovation ecosystems, and analysing how their design, governance, and actor configurations influence experimentation, knowledge flows, and public value creation.
• Collaborative governance and innovation procurement: Exploring how evolving public-private and cross-sector partnerships shape the governance of smart city innovation ecosystems, with particular attention to procurement practices, actor interdependencies, and the distribution of roles and responsibilities in co-producing urban transformation.

Key References

Blasi, S., Gobbo, E., & Sedita, S. R. (2022). Smart cities and citizen engagement: Evidence from Twitter data analysis on Italian municipalities. Journal of Urban Management, 11(2), 153-165.
Brail, S., & Donald, B. (Eds.). (2024). Urban Mobility: How the iPhone, COVID, and Climate Changed Everything. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Caloffi, A., Pryke, S., Sedita, S. R., & Siemiatycki, M. (2017). Public–private partnerships and beyond: Potential for innovation and sustainable development. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 35(5), 739-745.
Colovic, A., Caloffi, A., & Rossi, F. (2022). Crowdsourcing and COVID‐19: How public administrations mobilize crowds to find solutions to problems posed by the pandemic. Public Administration Review, 82(4), 756-763.
Ersoy, A. (2017). Smart cities as a mechanism towards a broader understanding of infrastructure interdependencies. Regional Studies, Regional Science, 4(1), 26-31.
Ersoy, A., & van Bueren, E. (2020). Challenges of urban living labs towards the future of local innovation. Urban Planning, 5(4), 89-100.
Mora, L., Gerli, P., Beckers, D., Thabit, S., & Tonnarelli, F. (2025). Smart City Code: Governance Handbook for Digital Transformation Managers in the Public Sector. New York City, NY: Elsevier.
Mora, L., Gerli, P., Ardito, L., & Messeni Petruzzelli, A. (2023). Smart city governance from an innovation management perspective: Theoretical framing, review of current practices, and future research agenda. Technovation, 123, 102717.