Multi-level governance for sustainable innovation in smart communities: an ecosystems approach

This paper analyses the TrentoSmartCity project to redefine Trento (an Italian municipality) as a smart community according to an ecosystems view that explores the different resources, value propositions and co-creation practices arising from actors’ engagement. Smart technology is considered a key lever for community well-being that should be associated with human and management skills to foster the emergence of sustainable growth. A literature review on the key areas of smart communities was performed to identify a gap in extant research related to the scarcity of studies examining the strategic role of governance in communities. Then, the main ecosystems elements were introduced to show the suitability of this theory for the introduction of an integrated view based on multi-level governance and service ecosystems. Findings from the case study on the TrentoSmartCity allowed the development of a theoretical framework that identified the main drivers for sustainable growth in smart communities by showing the need to introduce a meta-level to address the harmonizing role of governance. Thus, the study detected, firstly, the main ecosystem’s elements involved in Trento communities and, secondly, how multi-level governance could strategically manage these elements for the harmonization of multi-stakeholder’s objectives to attain social growth. The identification of the strategic drivers for sustainable development in smart communities as well as the main decision-making and policy-making steps could help scholars and practitioners shed light on the key role of entrepreneurship and governance in the development of sustainable innovation.