Service Innovation and Smart Cities: Linking the Perspectives.

Cities are innovating thanks to the transformations in smart cities taking place in recent years. Nowadays, cities are emerging as contexts in which different stakeholders merge their resources in activities, by defining and improving the way they focus on the support given to reach common aims. This phenomenon is becoming increasingly prevalent, but an investigation on how to frame it in the service innovation literature is still missing. We move from this gap to link smart cities and service innovation from a theoretical point of view; subsequently, an analysis is performed on documents provided by organisations carrying on smart projects all over the world. A content analysis is used to highlight how the interventions by smart service providers can be considered in service innovation literature and to show how different firms operate in connection with the key elements of service innovation provided by Lusch and Nambisan (MIS Quarterly, 39(1), 155–175, 2015). The results of the analysis are useful to describe, from a practical point of view, how service innovation is taking place in cities and how relevant the roles played by actors involved in smart services are, as these actors favour a better knowledge of the needs to be satisfied, carry resources and skills, evaluate services and provide data. Finally, data play a crucial role when referring to platforms, as the core of smart service provision, leading technology to act as a significant support for service innovation in the city context.