دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی شهرهای نوآورانه هوشمند: تاثیر سیاست های شهر هوشمند در نوآوری شهری - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

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 much less clear when looking at the microfoundations of this effect. In this paper we look at the urban innovation impact of Smart City policies. In fact, typical Smart City projects imply the involvement not only of major multinational corporations, along with local public authorities, but also of local companies, typically with the aim to translate general technological solutions to the local needs. A new data set collected for these analyses comprises data on Smart City features for 309 European metropolitan areas, Smart City policy intensity, and urban innovation outputs. The latter are proxied by calculating total patent applications to the European Patent Office between 2008 and 2013. Patent counts also include technologically narrower classes, namely high-tech, ICT, and specific Smart City technologies patent applications. Propensity Score Matching estimates suggest that cities engaging in Smart City policies above the EU average also tend to patent more intensively. This effect is stronger for high-tech patents, while decreases for more narrowly defined technological classes. This last result suggests possible technological spillovers from technologies directly involved in Smart City policies.

6. Conclusions

Are Smart City policies the new direction for urban initiatives? Are they conducive to sustainability, livability and economic growth? While these questions are still unanswered (and will probably be so for quite a while), in this paper we have added to our understanding of the mechanisms through which Smart City policies foster urban economic performance by investigating their impact through urban innovation. Our empirical findings, based on PSM, allow us to conclude that SC policies do have a non-negligible positive impact on urban innovation measured through patenting activity, especially in high-tech classes. Results are robust to a number of consistency checks, both in terms of the way Smart City policies are identified, as well as the way Smart City-related technologies are measured (i.e., which IPC classes are used to calculate Smart City technology intensity).

Results also suggest that SC policies indeed stimulate innovation that increases a city's stock of knowledge, one of the main recognized drivers of economic growth. Our findings are based on the analysis of 309 EU cities and exploit the differences in the intensity of SC policy adoption. Cities that engage in SC policy above the EU average tend to innovate more. The propensity to innovate is measured by the number of patents filed in four alternative technology class definitions (total patent applications, high tech patent applications, ICT patent applications and SC patent applications). A relevant commitment to SC policy initiatives is in particular positively associated to higher overall innovation rates, as well as innovation rates in high tech, ICT, and SC (IoT) patents. The use of a PSM procedure also allows to safely infer that reverse causality is not an issue and that this positive association can be interpreted in a causal sense.