Overcoming the Tipping Point Through Service Innovation. An Overview of the Smart City

This conceptual paper aims to understand what can allow smart cities, considered as service ecosystems, to effectively face the important challenges and uncertainties of our time, such as the energy crisis, by adopting the phase transitions interpretative lens. To reach this purpose, a literature review on smart cities and phase transition in a service ecosystem perspective has been carried out to merge their main concepts through the ‘integrating’ method for providing researchers and practitioners with suggestions on this topic observed in a new perspective. However, by using the phase transition perspective, the severity of the current energy crisis could represent a tipping point for smart cities and foster fluctuations difficult to absorb and system destabilization and de-institutionalization. Service innovation perspective can be considered as a driver to enable smart cities to react quickly and effectively to unforeseen changes. An example can be found in the digital twin city that would allow policy-makers to remotely monitor the behavior of the real city, plan and develop projects by first observing its effects on the virtual twin to not waste resources, anticipate any problems and carry out corrective actions in a predictive manner, in order to effectively navigate the transition and move towards a re-stabilization through new institutional arrangements. Thanks to this study, smart cities’ policy-makers and scholars can design new city patterns based on smart technologies to pursue viability and resource waste reduction conditions, despite the change.