Smart Cities and Innovation: a multi-stakeholder perspective

Smart cities emerge when multi-driven projects are defined and activated in urban contexts. In these areas stakeholders perform lots of different activities daily and thanks to new technologies they can accomplish better services for them and for all of the people directly benefiting of them in the city context. When projects for smart cities are defined in this way, different models can arise, as it happened during last decade, with lots of different players engaged in defining them and in shaping them in detail. Furthermore the models built in this way are useful to focus on stakeholders to be involved and considered, on all the activities to be performed both from local agencies and from stakeholders, and finally on platforms created in order to encourage support by everyone. Nowadays smart cities projects are more and more and they are based on the model we considered in this research. The main aims of these projects are the innovation of the paths leading to better services and the creation of a context in which stakeholders’ participation could attain higher levels. In order to focus on these aspects we analysed some of the most common models and some of the empirical evidences emerging from smart cities to depict the range of stakeholders involved in smartization activities and to describe in depth their contributions arising thanks to their efforts, especially in terms of innovation, shaping a multi-stakeholder approach to implement these projects.