Building an Open Service Innovation Platform for a City’s Needs: an Empirical Study on Smart Cities

The purpose of this paper is to increase knowledge of central issues in building a concept for an open innovation platform for a city’s needs. So far, there is very little knowledge of the fundamental question that needs to be answered when building up an innovation platform which aims at developing solutions to a city’s problems and needs. This paper empirically fills this knowledge gap and contributes to the innovation intermediary as well as urban development and Smart City literature. The results of this study have also clear practical implications particularly to urban policy makers and developers, as well as educators in the field of innovation and urban development. The present empirical findings are based on a study in progress. The research method is qualitative and draws on data from in-depth interviews and co-creative multi actor workshops. It identifies a number of relevant factors that need to be considered when planning and developing a concept for an open service innovation platform for a city’s needs. Various questions have to be answered and a number of decisions have to be made in order to develop the concept for the innovation platform. The nature of the innovation platform is determined by the various choices made in respect of these factors.