Cities as Collaborative Innovation Platforms

In this article, we focus on the role of a city as an orchestrator for innovation. We argue that cities should establish active dialogue with their citizens, and private and public sectors actors to co-create, develop, test, and offer service innovations that utilize diverse sets of platforms such as living labs. Our research contributes to the discussions of open and user innovations from the perspective of cities as communities that involve and integrate citizens and companies to collaborative innovation activities. While acknowledging that cities are platforms for simultaneous and divergent innovation initiatives, we identify four principal types of collaborative innovation. Cities serve as platforms for: i) improving everyday life; ii) conducting consumer and citizen experiments; iii) experimenting and implementing new technologies and services; and iv) creating new innovations and economies. Finally, we offer guidelines for fostering collaborative innovation activities between the public and private sectors.