Introduction

Smart City policies have attracted relevant attention and funding over the last few years. While the time seems now ripe to conclude that such policies have a positive impact on urban economic growth, the picture is not as clear when looking at the microfoundations of this effect. In fact, while statistical evidence does suggest the existence of a positive association between the implementation of Smart City policies and urban economic performance (Caragliu and Del Bo, 2018a), how this exactly comes about is much less clear. One possible channel for Smart City policies to exert a positive impact on economic performance and growth is through fostering urban innovation. In fact, Smart City projects are often the result of a strategic interaction between major multinational corporations heavily investing in these technologies, and municipal and regional authorities seeking to enhance local performance by means of adapting such technologies to the local needs. While the latter seek to maximize public value creation (Anthopoulos et al., 2016), cities also resort to private investors both as additional means of financing as well as a way to enact public investment strategies (Galati, 2017). The literature on Smart Cities stresses the need for local context conditions for fully reaping the benefits of large investments in hightech solutions (Caragliu et al., 2011). It therefore comes as no surprise if technologies that are conceived for a vast audience need to be translated, with the involvement of local actors, to the specific context where they are deployed. In GSMA (2013), several examples of local-global partnerships have been documented. For instance, over the last few years the municipality of San Francisco has started a pilot project called “SFpark” to collect, with mobile sensors, information on parking space availability throughout the city to be distributed to drivers by means of a dedicated app. Moreover, the app also prices available parking spots on the basis of present demand and supply conditions. While sensors used for identifying parking availability have been provided by Fybr, a Saint Louis-based company with international clients (https://fybr.com; at the time the project began, StreetSmart Technologies), three local public agencies, viz. the City of San Francisco, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) and the San Francisco County Transportation Authority (SFCTA), have been involved in the deployment of the sensors and in monitoring the project’s performance (UPADE, 2014). Another example also discussed in GSMA (2013) is the municipality of Busan’s (South Korea) partnership with Cisco and KT to promote an App Development Centre to co-create Smart City services by means of start-ups. A cloud-based mobile app development platform has helped establishing over the first year since inception 13 start-ups, which yielded a grand total of 70 new apps, with total revenues equal to 2.2 million USD and revenues from online sales equal to 42,000 USD. Other celebrated examples of effective public-private partnerships for delivering innovative Smart City technologies are also discussed in the literature on European case studies. For instance, Amsterdam’s Climate Street initiative has the aim to transform a traditional retail street, Utrechtsestraat, into a sustainable shopping area by optimizing the street’s stores’ energy and logistics management, along with the related public services. Smart meters constantly monitor demand and supply of energy, and grids also constantly measure how full public trashcans are, so that waste collection only takes place when needed. These combined actions have allowed the city of Amsterdam reduce annual CO2 emissions from 3400 tons in 2010 to 1276 tons in 2012 (GSMA, 2013).