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.
Across European cities local entrepreneurs are joining forces in new ways, forming collectives to stimulate business growth and innovation and to create a more attractive business environment. The value of such collectives is increasingly recognized by local governments and policy measures to stimulate these initiatives are being developed. Amsterdam hosts different collaborative initiatives, including 39 business improvement districts (BIDs).The Knowledge Mile is such a collective in which shopkeepers, other local SMEs, residents work together to collectively improve a large retail area. The city of Amsterdam is also a stakeholder. Government can fill an important role in enabling the creation of collective resource management in urban settings. However, if effective regulation is missing, citizens and governing bodies have to look for incentives to find new means of addressing governance. As such, the potential for collective management of urban commons may be greater than realized so far, as there is still a lack of knowledge in this area. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap. By means of an embedded case study approach, we analyze the interaction between the stakeholders in their development of a green zone, the Knowledge Mile Park, in the Wibautstraat. In the coming years, roofs, facades and ground level will be changed through a collaboration of residents, entrepreneurs, researchers, civil servants and students in a metropolitan Living Lab. In this Living Lab, solutions for a healthy and social environment, climate resistance and biodiversity are jointly developed, tested and shown. In our study, we will analyze the role of the governing bodies in such initiatives, and make recommendations how collectives can become more mainstream with new kinds of institutions, without an undue burden on the community.
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