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Based on the perspective of technology supply chain, this study explores the effect of macroeconomic uncertainty regarding the spatiotemporal evolution of urban innovation networks to establish causality.

It collects patent trading data for 283 cities in China (2005–2017) and employs the spatial econometric model to investigate the causal relationship.

The regional transfer of advanced technology in China is rising sharply, and the innovation network based on patent trading is typically high-density, multi-direction and wide-spreading. Further, macroeconomic uncertainty has a negative effect on the scale of innovation flows and the absorptive capacity in eastern cities. However, it has no significant impact on the innovation network characteristics in developed cities. In contrast, macroeconomic uncertainty is detrimental for the absorptive capacity and node importance in inland and undeveloped cities.

As macroeconomic uncertainty increases, it is important to improve the quality of the urban innovation network with a better understanding of heterogeneity to promote further suitability innovation at the region-level.

This study highlights a clear and distinctive view that macroeconomic uncertainty not only directly affects the evolution of the urban innovation network but also indirectly affects the characteristics of other city nodes via the spatial spillover mechanism.

This paper examines innovation implementation in the public sector. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the “black box” of implementation of innovations and then answer questions of hindrances and opportunities when it comes to implementing innovative ideas in the public sector.

The specific context in this case is a city organization that received funding from the Delegation for Sustainable Cities to put six innovative ideas into practice in a city district. The data collection methods consisted of interviews and observations of meetings where the implementation phase was discussed.

The findings imply that innovative ideas that seemed best on paper often proved to be difficult to implement. The possibility of funding, for example, provided a reason to think “outside the box”, but the system for presenting the ideas in order to obtain the funding was time consuming. The resulting delay meant that, by the time the applications were evaluated, the submitted ideas were no longer necessarily the best available. The findings also imply that one important role of public organizations in implementing innovations is to facilitate the response by its users, here the inhabitants.

When discussing innovations and implementation the time aspects is a limitation, the future might imply other effects than the ones visible here.

Public sector managers possibilities of organizing to be more innovative can be discussed. From a management perspective focus might thus be on facilitate the implementation of the innovation, since the demand of the new solutions might be other than expected.

The users of public sector innovations, here the inhabitants, might demand other things that expected, which highlights the need of an ongoing dialogue between city managers and inhabitants.

The methodology of following projects in real time proved to be a unique approach for understanding the ”black box” of implementing innovative ideas. The existing paradoxes of managing public sector organizations are thus illustrated.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and demonstrate the relevance of marketing systems, notably the process of product management and innovation, to urban development challenges.

A macromarketing perspective is adopted to construe the city as a product and begin the application of the innovation process to urban management, following the steps commonly proposed for successful innovation in product management. An example of the application of the initial new product development steps of idea generation and opportunity identification is presented.

The innovation process provides guidelines and checkpoints that enable corporations to improve the success rate of their development initiatives. Cities, like corporations, need to innovate in order to maintain their image and functionality, to provide a myriad benefits to their stakeholders and, thereby, to survive and grow. The example here shows how the preliminary NPD steps of idea generation and opportunity identification enrich the process of identifying and analysing new industry opportunities for a city.

By conceptualising the city as a multifaceted product, the disciplined planning and evaluation processes pertinent to NPD success become relevant and helpful to practitioners responsible for urban planning, urban development and change.

The paper shows how pertinent concepts and processes from marketing can be effectively applied to urban planning and economic development initiatives.

We are interested in modeling the impact of spatial and interindustry dependence on firm-level innovation of Chinese firms The existence of network ties between cities imply that changes taking place in one city could influence innovation by firms in nearby cities (local spatial spillovers), or set in motion a series of spatial diffusion and feedback impacts across multiple cities (global spatial spillovers). We use the term local spatial spillovers to reflect a scenario where only immediately neighboring cities are impacted, whereas the term global spatial spillovers represent a situation where impacts fall on neighboring cities, as well as higher order neighbors (neighbors to the neighboring cities, neighbors to the neighbors of the neighbors, and so on). Global spatial spillovers also involve feedback impacts from neighboring cities, and imply the existence of a wider diffusion of impacts over space (higher order neighbors).

Similarly, the existence of national interindustry input-output ties implies that changes occurring in one industry could influence innovation by firms operating in directly related industries (local interindustry spillovers), or set in motion a series of in interindustry diffusion and feedback impacts across multiple industries (global interindustry spillovers).

Typical linear models of firm-level innovation based on knowledge production functions would rely on city- and industry-specific fixed effects to allow for differences in the level of innovation by firms located in different cities and operating in different industries. This approach however ignores the fact that, spatial dependence between cities and interindustry dependence arising from input-output relationships, may imply interaction, not simply heterogeneity across cities and industries.

We construct a Bayesian hierarchical model that allows for both city- and industry-level interaction (global spillovers) and subsumes other innovation scenarios such as: (1) heterogeneity that implies level differences (fixed effects) and (2) contextual effects that imply local spillovers as special cases.

This study aims to examine two innovation zones in China, including the Suzhou Industrial Park and Tianjin Eco-city, to gain a comprehensive understanding of city locations attributes and its relationship to inward foreign direct investment (FDI) from multinational enterprises (MNEs) in innovation zones embedded in nonhub cities in China.

This research incorporates two site visits and in-depth interviews with 39 personnel working with innovation zones. Thematic analysis is used to analyze interview data and documents.

The results highlight that cities can use innovation zones as a strategy to build high scale knowledge community precincts to connect MNEs and other global actors. As an important institutional feature of city locations, innovation zones increase within-city connectivity and connect cities in global networks resulting in cross-city connectivity to attract FDI from MNEs. From a dynamic knowledge community perspective, this research also compares active and passive approaches toward building knowledge communities and identifies several elements of knowledge communities within innovation zones in China.

The research results could be further explored in other institutional and economic contexts, to understand the interplay of city locations, FDI and innovation zones, and the dynamics of building knowledge communities.

This research has several implications for policymakers and administrators who work with municipal economic development and the development and enhancement of innovation zones. It offers recommendations for MNEs to consider where to make foreign investments and the advantages innovation zones may offer to support FDI.

This research contributes to the literature related to economic development and how nonhub cities can attract FDI and join global networks. It offers empirical insights drawn from two successful innovation zones located in nonhub cities in China.

This study aims to analyze the relevance of the city spatial structure for smart city innovation from the perspective of agglomeration externalities, and discusses whether there is heterogeneity in innovation across different geographical areas and population scales of cities.

The authors construct the centralization and concentration indexes to conceptualize the city spatial structure of 286 cities (prefecture-level) in China based on the LandScan Global Population Dataset from 2001 to 2016. A fixed-effects panel data model is employed to analyze the relationship between the spatial structure and the innovation ability of smart cities; the results were validated through robustness tests and heterogeneity analyses.

The study found that the more concentrated and more evenly the distribution of urban population, namely the more city spatial structure tends to be weak-monocentricity, the higher the level of innovation in smart cities. The relevance of the weak-monocentricity structure and smart city innovation varies significantly depending on their geographical location and the size of the city. This result is more applicable to cities in the eastern and central regions, as well as to cities with smaller populations.

The adjustment and optimization of the city spatial structure is important for enhancing smart city construction. Unlike previous studies, which mostly use a single dimension of “the proportion of population in sub-centres to the population of all central areas” to measure city spatial structure, the authors employed the spatial centralization and spatial concentration. It is hoped that this study can guide smart city construction from the perspective of the development model of city spatial structure.

This paper investigates the roles and activities of the orchestrators of innovation networks constituted within cities. In this sense, the authors expected to contribute for research related to the roles and activities of the orchestrators of innovation networks constituted in the scope of cities given the large number and diversity of complex and multiple dimensions social actors (Castells & Borja, 1996; Reypens, Lievens & Blazevic, 2019).

The authors conducted an exploratory research with a single case study in depth. The case chosen for the paper is the case of Pacto Alegre. The case selection criterion was the relevance of the Pacto Alegre Case in the construction of an innovation network in the city of Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The Pacto Alegre network was proposed by the Alliance for Innovation (composed of the three main Universities in the city: UFRGS, PUCRS and UNISINOS) and by the Municipality of Porto Alegre. In addition to these actors, the network counts on financial and development institutions as sponsors, with media partners, with design partners, with an advisory board (composed of five professionals considered references in different themes) and composed by more than 100 companies, associations and institutions from different areas (Pacto Alegre, 2019). Data were collected from 09/20/2020 to 11/30/2020 through in-depth interviews, documentary research and non-participant observation.

In this research, the authors highlighted the city as a community that involves and integrates various actors, such as citizens and companies, to collaborative innovation activities. For this, they proposed a framework on innovation networks and network orchestration. In this direction, seven dimensions of the “orchestration of innovation networks” were assumed as a result of the combination of previous studies by Dhanaraj and Parke (2006), Hurmelinna-Laukkanen et al. (2011) and da Silva and Bitencourt (2019). In the sequence, different roles of orchestrators associated with the literature were adopted based on the work by Pikkarainen et al. (2017) and Nielsen and Gausdal (2017).

The authors’ results advance in relation to other fields by promoting the expansion of the “orchestration of innovation networks” model with the combination of distinct elements from the literature in a coherent whole (agenda setting, mobilization, network stabilization, creation and transfer of knowledge, innovation appropriability, coordination and co-creation) and in the validation of its applicability in the context of the innovation network studied. In addition, when relating different roles of orchestrators to the seven dimensions studied, it was realized that there is no linear and objective relationship between the dimensions and roles of the orchestrator, as in each dimension there may be more than one role being played in the orchestration.

Therefore, the findings suggest two theoretical contributions. First, the authors identified a role not discussed in the literature, here called the communicator. In the case analysis, the authors observed the communicator role through functions performed by a media partner of the innovation network and by a group of civil society engaged in the city's causes. Second, the authors indicated a new dimension of orchestration related to the management of communication in the innovation network and its externalities such as p. ex. civil and organized society, characteristic of an innovation network set up within a city.

Although several studies have proposed advances in the understanding of the orchestration of innovation networks (Dhanaraj & Parkhe, 2006; Ritala, Armila & Blomqvist, 2009; Nambisan & Sawhney, 2011; Hurmelinna-Laukkanen et al., 2011), the discussion on the topic is still a black box (Nilsen & Gausdal, 2017). More specifically, the authors identified a gap in the literature about the role and activities of actors in the city level. Few studies connected the regional dimension with the roles and activities of the orchestrators (Hurmelinna-Laukkanen et al., 2011; Pikkarainen et al., 2017), raising several challenges and opportunities to be considered by academics and managers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether fiscal decentralization has impacts on city innovation level and to examine the moderating effects of the preference for government innovation in China.

Using a panel data of China’s 278 cities from 2003 to 2016, the authors first use fixed-effect model and quantile regression to analyze the impact of fiscal decentralization on city innovation level and the variations of impacts conditional on different innovation levels, followed by a mediating effect model to test the moderating effects of the preference for government innovation and its temporal and spatial heterogeneity.

The paper finds that fiscal decentralization significantly inhibited city innovation, and with the improvement of city innovation level, the inhibition demonstrated characteristics of “V” type variation. When the degree of fiscal decentralization is between 0.377 and 0.600, the inhibition of fiscal decentralization on city innovation level is the weakest. We further show that fiscal decentralization also inhibits the government's preference for innovation, reduces the proportion of fiscal expenditure on innovation and has a negative impact on city innovation. In addition, the influence of fiscal decentralization on city innovation present clear heterogeneity in space and in time. On one hand, the inhibition of fiscal decentralization on city innovation level in eastern China is significantly weaker than that in central and Western China; on the other hand, after the implementation of China’s innovation-driven development strategy in 2013, the negative impact of fiscal decentralization on city innovation disappeared.

The research findings have certain policy implications. That is, in the process of decentralization reform, on the one hand, the central government should strengthen the supervision over the fiscal expenditure of local governments and ensure that the central government can play a leading role in the local development strategy, on the other hand, the central government should guard against the distortion of fiscal decentralization on local governments' fiscal expenditure behavior. In addition, the central government should also focus on the heterogeneity of the impacts of fiscal decentralization on cities under different strategic backgrounds and different levels of innovation.

This paper extends prior research by bringing the decentralization system reform into the study of city innovation system and analyzing its mechanism and its temporal and spatial heterogeneity.

The purpose of this paper is to satisfy a clear gap in the main field of open innovation research whereabouts a very little scholarship try to analyze the mechanisms of innovative milieu down smart cities environments by applying through innovative projects that seem to support efficiently the entry of private firms and citizens in public collaborations.

The research performed an exploratory and qualitative evaluation based on the case study method built on the evaluation of organizational behavior and urban boosting innovation through smart city initiatives. In doing so, after a literature review in smart city as well in lean methodology fields, the case of Turin Smart City follows.

As acknowledged by international literature, the paper shows how a lean approach enables local government to define and realize smart projects and initiatives in a faster and more effective way. Particularly, the government in one of the main cities in Italy, id est Turin, combines a lean methodology with the job-to-be done approach, according a new concept of smart initiatives involving a startup mentality for the lead users which enables interesting predictions relating the human aspects of open collaborations.

The specificity of this inquiry highlights valuable insights from double-gate smart cities’ innovation, social and urban as well. The research is largely interpretative and exploratory and while this provides a solid scientific foundation for further research, it does not, itself, subject any hypothesis to statistical testing and validation.

Since the city approached the smart city subject in a lean way, it was able to realize some projects in a faster way. Through specific initiatives, the city acquires the ability to involve more and better all its stakeholders such as citizens, companies, and public employees, among others. In this regard, the paper invigorates managerial debates concerning the urban and social aspects of open innovation ecosystems which represent in our minds a superior level of open innovation, testbeds of positive knowledge, and stimulus of knowledge dissemination process around the city.

A city is a spatial carrier of innovation activities. Improving the level of urban innovation can play a significant supporting role in building an innovative country. China began to implement the innovative city pilot policy in 2008 and continued to expand the policy into more areas for exploring the path of innovative urban development with Chinese characteristics and improving urban innovation.

Based on mechanism analysis, this paper used the panel data of 269 cities from 2003 to 2016 to empirically test the effect of the pilot policy on the level of urban innovation by using different methods, such as the difference-in-differences model.

The results show that the innovative city pilot policy significantly improves the level of urban innovation. However, according to the findings of the heterogeneity analysis, the effect of the pilot policy on improving the innovation level in direct-controlled municipalities, provincial capitals and sub-provincial cities is weaker than that in ordinary cities, and the effect of the pilot policy on improving the innovation level in cities with a higher quality of science and education resources is weaker than that in cities with lower quality of science and education resources.

Moreover, as the level of urban innovation increases, the effect of the pilot policy on improving the level of urban innovation is an asymmetric inverted V shape, which means the effect is first strengthened and then weakened. The research also finds that the locational heterogeneity of the pilot policy for improving the level of urban innovation is not notable. In addition, the innovative city pilot policy can strengthen the government's strategic guidance, promote the concentration of talent, incentivize corporate investment and optimize the innovation environment, having a positive impact on urban innovation. Moreover, the effect of concentration of talent and the effect of corporate investment incentive are the important reasons for the pilot policy to promote the improvement of the level of urban innovation.