These days, the rules of the business environment and innovation are continuously inclining to change, supported by a process of technological revolution that is leading to the redefinition of the competition patterns of the game by managers; such managers are at one and the same time constrained to reconsider the fundamentals of the business model, and conversely to re-plan and reassert the boundaries of business organizations in order to innovate and develop durable and renewable competitive advantages within a “open space” ecosystem (Adler and Kwon, 2002; Pisano et al., 2015; Vrontis et al., 2016). Innovation business models progressively assume that the discovery of novel products and processes goes through a crossover exchange of knowledge and capabilities outside-in and inside-out the firm, supported by external and internal relationships with various innovator stakeholders who are involved in various ways in the industrial and technological discovery-driven process, accentuating the need for the firm to drain, acquire, and combine knowledge from its context (Caetano and Amaral, 2011; Carayannis and Campbell, 2011; Del Giudice and Della Peruta, 2013). This challenge not only constantly engages firms in business competitions and dynamics in unpredictable ways, requiring them to revisit their mindsets and practices, but also to build on and significantly intensify their stock and flow of intellectual capital within their organizations over time (Kale et al., 2000; Murray et al., 2016). The importance of both current and new resources and competencies thus dictates that innovative firms have to maintain their adaptiveness by exploiting their current knowledge and exploring new knowledge (Chesbrough, 2007; Floyd and Lane, 2000; Levinthal and March, 1993). Once privately owned, such knowledge and technologies have become increasingly absorbed further in public contexts accessible to individuals, governments, and research institutions, making acquisition feasible at both the individual and organizational levels (Del Giudice et al., 2012). In this context, external sources of knowledge represent a crucial aspect for open innovation development, which can support, screen, and assimilate external inputs to be used and combine entrepreneurially in order to sustain knowledge-based innovation processes along the ecosystem (Del Giudice and Della Peruta, 2016). In this theoretical arrangement, the smart city can be considered an open platform of external knowledge, available in a codified, but especially a tacit manner, thus intensifying the requirement to support and develop exchange and relationship processes among actors in order to build and diffuse a knowledge-based society and a technological arena of competition (Del Giudice et al., 2013; Mital et al., 2017; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995). With this is mind, this study aimed to redefine and reconsider not only the sources of knowledge, but also the boundaries of innovation gates, which lead to consideration not only of a shift from labor-oriented activities to leisure and pleasurable engagements for human resources, according to a new milieu for open innovation in which new technological issues and ideas evolve from bottom-up long-run collaborations among various stakeholders (private or public), and include urban dynamics to cloud systems of innovation (Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 2000; Du Plessis, 2007).