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Balancing exploration and exploitation in sustainable urban innovation

The potential of technological innovation to address urban sustainability has been widely acknowledged over the last decade. Across cities globally, local governments have engaged in partnership arrangements with the private sector to initiate pilot projects for urban innovation, typically co-funded by innovation subsidies. A recurring challenge however is how to scale up successful projects and generate more impact. Drawing on the business and management literature, we introduce the concept of organizational ambidexterity to provide a novel theoretical perspective on sustainable urban innovations. We examine how to align exploration (i.e., test and experiment with digital technologies, products, platforms, and services) with exploitation (i.e., reaping the financial benefits from digital technologies by bringing products, platforms, and services to the market), rooted in the literature on smart cities. We conclude that the concept of ambidexterity, as elaborated in the business and management literature and practiced by firms, can be translated to the city policy domain, provided that upscaling or exploitation in a smart city context also includes the translation of insights from urban experiments, successful or not, into new routines, regulations, protocols, and stakeholder/citizen engagement methods.

Smart city pilot projects, scaling up or fading out?

In many cities, pilot projects are set up to test or develop new technologies that improve sustainability, urban quality of life or urban services (often labelled as “smart city” projects). Typically, these projects are supported by the municipality, funded by subsidies, and run in partnerships. Many projects however die after the pilot stage, and never scale up. Policymakers on all levels consider this as a challenge and search for solutions. In this paper, we analyse the process of upscaling, focusing on smart city projects in which several partners –with different missions, agenda’s and incentives- join up. First, we review the extant literature on upscaling from development studies, business studies, and the transition management literature. Based on insights from these literatures, we identify three types of upscaling: roll-out, expansion and replication, each with their own dynamics, context sensitivity and scaling barriers. We illustrate the typology with recent smart city projects in Amsterdam. Based on desk research and in-depth interviews with a number of project stakeholders and partners of the Amsterdam Smart City platform, we analyse three projects in depth, in order to illustrate the challenges of different upscaling types. i) Energy Atlas, an EU-funded open data project in which the grid company, utilities and local government set up a detailed online platform showing real-time energy use on the level of the building block; ii) Climate Street, a project that intended to make an entire urban high street sustainable, involving a large number of stakeholders, and iii) Ikringloop, an application that helps to recycle or to re-use waste. Each of the projects faced great complexities in the upscaling process, albeit to a varying degree. The paper ends with conclusions and recommendations on pilot projects and partnership governance, and adds new reflections to the debates on upscaling.

CURE+ Baseline study: City of Tartu, Estonia

Hoe krijgen we de sjoemelende accountant weer op de rails?

In 2023 bleek dat accountantskantoren KPMG en Deloitte de afgelopen jaren hebben gefraudeerd met verplichte examens. Het leidde onder andere tot het aftreden van partners. Andere accountskantoren gaan op verzoek van de AFM intern onderzoek doen of de examenfraude ook bij hen voorkomt. Wat dat onderzoek ook oplevert, in ieder geval laat de sector zien dat ze haar maatschappelijke functie uit het oog verliest. Het gedachtegoed van de ethicus Alasdair MacIntyre kan volgens Gert de Jong richtlijnen geven om de sector weer op het juiste spoor te krijgen.

Future-oriented learning within the business sector

The future of the business sector for students in higher education is uncertain. The reasons for this are technological developments, the effects of globalisation and the shifting of business models (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014; Helbing, 2014). The consequences of digitalisation and robotisation are large for professions in the financial-economic sector, such as accountancy and finance, business economy, and marketing (Frey & Osborne, 2013; Deloitte, 2016). As a result, certain jobs will disappear, but on the other hand new types of jobs will arise. It is expected that people in employment will have to have a strong adaptive ability to handle fast changes. There is an increasing expectation that they need to be mobile between employers and that they should be able to deal with a variety of new tasks, roles and positions (Dochy, Berghmans, Koenen, & Segers, 2015). Professionals need to have a sense of great flexibility in order to be able to anticipate these changes based on their own power and ambition. In addition to this adaptive ability, good interpersonal skills are essential due to the need for working in multidisciplinary teams on complex issues (Onstenk, 2017). The Social and Economic Council of the Netherlands (Sociaal-Economische Raad, 2017) presumes that the level of basic skills required to participate in an increasingly complex society is continuously growing, and they advise upcoming professionals to train their resistance, flexibility and the ability to continuously develop in order to maintain sustainable employability. In this way professionals regularly need to be able to reinvent themselves during periods of change (Van Water & Weggeman, 2017; Frie, Potting, Sjoer, & Van der Heijden, submitted for publication). This chapter will describe how the Department of Business, Finance & Marketing (BFM) of The Hague University of Applied Sciences (THUAS) has found an answer to the challenges of a Department-wide educational innovation. First it is outlined what this innovation involves and how it will be designed. The net paragraph clarifies the overlap in the competency profiles of the five programmes of BFM. Then the next steps of this educational innovation process are described. Finally, insights will be discussed as to the role of the lecturers and the business sector, as valuable partners, within this educational reform.

Tuchtprocedure SOBI / Deloitte: "Een merkwaardige uitspraak."

Het College van Beroep voor het bedrijfsleven (CBb) tegen accountant Deloitte in de Aholdzaak bevestigde het vonnis van de Raad van Tucht dat de accountant volgens de rechter 'ernstig tekort geschoten' is en blijk heeft gegeven van 'een grote mate van passiviteit'.Is deze uitspraak wel terecht en is de groepsaccountant tekortgeschoten? Naar mijn mening heeft de accounant zijn werk goed uitgevoerd en is de uitspraak van het CBb onjuist.