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This article investigates the practical implementation of the ecosystem approach in different branches of public management within an urban context. It explores how ecosystem thinking is introduced, disseminated and applied in a local government organization.

We utilize a qualitative case study methodology, relying on official documents and expert interviews. Our study focuses on the city of Espoo, Finland, which has actively embraced ecosystem thinking as a fundamental framework for its organizational development for almost a decade.

The case of Espoo highlights elements that have not been commonly attributed to the ecosystem approach in the public sector. These elements include (1) the significance of complementary services, (2) the existence of both collaborative and competitive relationships among actors in public service ecosystems and (3) the utilization of digital platforms for resource orchestration. Our study also emphasizes the need for an incremental adoption of ecosystem thinking in organizational contexts to enable its successful implementation.

The study provides valuable insights into the introduction and dissemination of ecosystem thinking in public management. It also further develops previously developed hypotheses regarding public service ecosystems.

This study aims to investigate the synergies between the economic environment and the smart living dimension embedded in the current smart city initiatives, focusing on the localization of female entrepreneurship in contemporary cities. This interaction is under-investigated and controversial as it includes cities' practices enabling users and citizens to develop their potential and build their own lives, affecting entrepreneurial and economic outcomes. Building upon the perspective of the innovation ecosystems, this study focuses on the impact of smart living dimensions and R&D investments on the localization of female entrepreneurial activities.

The study uses a Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) and a panel dataset that considers 30 Italian smart city projects for 12 years to demonstrate the relationship between smart living practices in cities and the localization of female entrepreneurship. The complementary effect of public R&D investment is also included as a driver in the “smart” city transition.

The study found that the advancement of smart living practices in cities drives the localization of female entrepreneurship. The study highlights the empirical results, the interaction over the years and a current overview through choropleth maps. The public R&D investment also affects this relationship.

This study advances the theoretical discussion on (1) female entrepreneurial intentions, (2) smart city advancement (as a context) and (3) smart living dimension (as a driver) and offers valuable insight for governance and policymakers.

This study offers empirical contributions to the preliminary academic debate on enterprise development and smart city trajectories at the intersection between human-based practices and female entrepreneurship.

This study offers empirical contributions to the preliminary academic debate on enterprise development and smart city trajectories at the intersection between human-based practices and female entrepreneurship. The findings provide valuable insights into the localization of female entrepreneurship in the context of smart cities.

The article attempts to shed light on the social aspects of research that deal with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and sustainable cities. The aim is to offer a global view of these facets' evolution and to provide information on people-centered smart cities.

The research is qualitative. A systematic bibliometric approach is a framework for the research. The unit of analysis is publications on SDGs and Smart Cities (SCs) indexed in Scopus. The authors used VOSviewer text mining functionality to construct co-occurrence networks of socially related critical terms extracted from textual data. The co-occurrence of keywords presents a valuable method and process for attaining in-depth analysis and fast comprehension of trends and linkages in articles from a holistic approach.

Social media, social sustainability and social capital are the three multifaceted social keywords that co-occur in SDGs and SCs. The paper provides a brief compendium of resources and frameworks to build a socially sustainable smart city.

The retrieval date was on 15 August 2019. The authors used the same search query for new papers released in 2019 and afterwards to update their findings. The authors collected 657 documents on SCs, compared to 2,975 documents about SDGs demonstrating that their findings are still trending in the same direction, emphasizing the importance of the research topic. SCs' social aspects are still chartered areas that require the attention to future research.

The authors’ decision to use two separate data sets for SCs and SDGs data files helps to provide a more comprehensive picture of the research landscape. It may identify areas where research is lacking or needs future research. The authors present an integrative agenda for a smart city to be socially sustainable. Innovative approaches to urban planning are required to empower the place and context and improve the users' satisfaction, where innovative solutions enable smart, sustainable and inclusive societies. Infrastructure governance is a critical keystone. It could guarantee that public investments contribute to sustainable urban development while enhancing city resilience, particularly in facing climate change and inclusive growth challenges.

The purpose of this study is to shed light on the twin transition in China in the organization of innovation processes in artificial intelligence (AI) and green technology (GT) development and to understand the role of foreign multinationals in Chinese innovation systems.

A qualitative research approach is used by interviewing executives from German multinationals with expertise in AI and GT development and organization of innovation processes in China. In total, 11 semi-structured interviews were conducted with companies, and the data were analysed with a thematic qualitative text analysis.

The findings show that AI applications for GT are primarily developed in cross-company projects that are led by local and regional authorities through the organization of industrial districts and clusters. German multinationals are either being integrated, remaining autonomous or being excluded from these twin transition innovation processes.

This paper aims to fill the gap in the literature by providing one of the first qualitative approach towards twin transition innovation processes in China and exploring the integration of multinational enterprises in cluster organizations. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is one of the first twin transition studies from this perspective in emerging economies.

This study explores the enablers of students “entrepreneurial intentions by identifying the factors that raise students” interest in embracing an entrepreneurial career.

Entrepreneurship education is increasingly attracting attention as a means of fostering entrepreneurial activity and creating a culture of innovation. Developing students' entrepreneurial intentions is critical to promote entrepreneurship. This research is built on a mixed method approach of partial least squares structural equation modelling and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis.

The factors that influence students ‘entrepreneurial intentions are identified: business incubation programmes, non-reimbursable grants for entrepreneurial students, networking events to promote entrepreneurship, mentoring services, innovation labs for business idea validation and entrepreneurship courses. This knowledge can help develop effective entrepreneurship education programmes. The study also provides actionable insights for educational institutions and policymakers. It underscores the need for innovative educational platforms such as entrepreneurial bootcamps. It also highlights the value of advanced learning environments such as decision theatres to foster a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation.

The study contributes to the body of knowledge on entrepreneurship education. It highlights the need for a multidisciplinary approach to understand the factors that shape students’ entrepreneurial intentions.

In recent years, environmental issues and resource depletion have posed significant challenges to firms and society. To address these environmental challenges, firms seek to build strategic alliances of green supply chain management (GSCM) with their supply chain partner. As the largest developing country in the Asia–Pacific region, China needs to take more responsibility for environmental protection, which requires more Chinese firms to participate in GSCM. Therefore, focusing on the issue of GSCM and innovation persistence in the context of an increasingly harsh ecological environment is essential.

To test the hypothesis, the authors perform an empirical analysis on a sample of 124 listed firms in China from 2014 to 2019. The results are robust to a battery of robustness analyses the authors performed to take care of endogeneity.

Empirical results indicate that GSCM can promote innovation persistence and both market environment turbulence and technology environment turbulence have a positive moderating effect on the relationship between the two. Mechanism tests show that GSCM can improve innovation efficiency, ensure innovation quality and alleviate financing constraints, thus promoting the innovation persistence of firms.

This study can provide a theoretical basis for the country to promote GSCM orientation, raise firms' awareness of the value of GSCM, convey the significance of GSCM to investors, influence firms' investment decisions and give experience to other developing countries.

In this final chapter, we explore the ever-evolving 21st century landscape where ethics drive community development toward resilience and progress. Drawing inspiration from the subheadings mapping our journey, we traverse international case studies spanning Canada, Brazil, Sweden, Kenya, China, Australia, Antarctica, and India. Through these global insights, we uncover the impacts of dynamic forces on communities worldwide, navigating ethical dilemmas and opportunities. We present strategies tailored to diverse continent-specific needs, explore inclusive governance models, and highlight the transformative power of ethical engagement. This journey underscores the vital role of resilience and concludes with a global call to embrace ethical approaches for inclusive community development and a sustainable future.

The purpose of this study is to propose an innovative and efficient process in urban policy-making that combines a divergent and creative method with a convergent and strategic one. At the same time, the purpose is also to propose a useful innovation to enforce the usability of both methods. On the one hand, mission-oriented policies run the risk of being overly focused on the present and of not being able to develop preparedness in organization. On the other hand, scenario development has the reverse problem it often does not point out how to use scenario narratives to inform and devise short-term strategic actions.

The paper proposes an innovative methodological approach, the mission-oriented scenarios, which hybridizes Mazzucato's mission-oriented public policy framework with Jim Dator's Manoa school four futures method. The proposed methodological innovation emerges from a urban foresight academic-led project carried out in the context of the Metropolitan City of Turin, Italy, where a first application of the mission-oriented scenarios was tested on six different focal issues (from reindustrialization to cultural policies) and the scenario narratives were used as sources for the grounding of 12 missions and 48 strategic actions towards 2030.

Mission-oriented scenarios can contribute to the generation of more sustainable and inclusive urban public policies. This methodological proposal is based on an original mix of knowledge exchange procedures borrowed from methodological approaches with different backgrounds: the mission-oriented and the archetypal scenarios. Their conjunction could support the formulation of ambitious yet pragmatic policies, giving a plurality of actors the opportunity to act and establish fruitful and lasting partnerships.

The paper reconstructs one of the first urban foresight projects carried out in a major Italian city by two prestigious universities and exposes a methodological innovation resulting from reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of the project, which opens the door to the development of a new scenario technique.

Against the background of the I50 paradigm, this paper queries in what ways blockchain and blockchain-based applications deployed in the smart city context facilitate the integration of the I50 paradigm in smart urban contexts.

A mixed methods approach is applied. First, by means of desk research and thematic literature review, a conceptual model integrating the I50 paradigm, smart city and blockchain-based solutions is built. Second, science mapping bibliometric analysis (SciMat) based on keywords’ co-occurrence is applied to a sample of 491 research articles to identify key domains of blockchain-based applications’ use in smart city. Third, a semi-systematic literature review complements insights gained through SciMat. Fourth, the findings are interpreted through the precepts of the conceptual model devised earlier.

The key blockchain-based applications in smart cities pertain to two domains, i.e. the foundational, service facilitation-oriented domain, including security (and safety), networks, computing, resource management and the service delivery-oriented domain, including mobility, energy and healthcare. Blockchain serves as the key building block for applications developed to deliver functions specific to each of the thus identified domains. A substantial layering of blockchain-based tools and applications is necessary to advance from the less to the more complex functional domains of the smart city.

At the conceptual level, the intricacies of the (making of the) I50 paradigm are discussed and a case for I50 – smart city – blockchain nexus is made. Easton’s input–output model as well as constructivism is referenced. At the empirical level, the key major domains of blockchain-based applications are discussed; those that bear the prospect of integrating the I50 paradigm in the smart city are highlighted. At the methodological level, a strategic move is made aimed at restoring the literature review’s role as subservient to the key line of exploration, to justify and ultimately support it, rather than to showcase the literature review as the ultimate purpose for itself.

Urban digital transformation has become a key strategy in global countries. This study aims to provide a comprehensive and dynamic exploration of the intrinsic traits associated with urban digital transformation, in order to yield detailed insights that can contribute to the formulation of well-informed decisions and strategies in the field of urban development initiatives.

Through analysis of parallels between urban digital transformation and gyroscope motion in physics, the study developed the urban digital transformation gyroscope model (UDTGM), which comprises of seven core elements. With the balanced panel dataset from 268 cities at and above the prefecture level in China, we validate the dynamic mechanism of this model.

The findings of this study underscore that the collaboration among infrastructure development, knowledge-driven forces and economic operations markedly bolsters the urban digital transformation gyroscope’s efficacy.

This research introduces a groundbreaking framework for comprehending urban digital transformation, potentially facilitating its balanced and systemic practical implementation.

This study pioneers the UDTGM theoretically and verifies the dynamic mechanism of this model with real data.