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Managing Open Innovation in Urban Labs

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Abstract

Urban labs are open innovation ecosystems, i.e. places, either promoted by companies or local institutions or spontaneously established by active citizens, wherein the current problems and challenges associated with a city are discussed and possibly innovative solutions are designed and implemented. Urban labs usually face complexity in managing the contributions of several heterogeneous actors. The paper presents the Urban Lab Methodology (ULM), which supports the management of urban labs by integrating Soft System Methodology with an open innovation framework previously developed by the authors. The former is a methodology to facilitate the structuration and solution of complex problems involving different stakeholders, whereas the latter aims at suggesting an association between the innovation context and the open innovation practices to be adopted. ULM is used to analyze the case study of Manifesto della Città Vecchia e del Mare (“The Old Town and Sea Manifesto”), a urban lab created in Taranto (Italy) in 2014. The analysis shows that theoretical prescriptions are to a great extent coherent with the real course of action and ULM is relatively easy to be adopted.

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Notes

  1. The framework is discussed in Bellantuono et al. (2013b), The reader is referred to the paper for a detailed description of the framework.

  2. In 1997 the Italian Ministry of Environment declared the area of Taranto at high risk of environmental crisis. Two recent Italian laws, Law n. 171 (4 October 2012) and Law n. 20 (4 March 2015), have defined the initial resources (336 million euros) and the procedures to adopt so as to start urgent measures for the land reclamation drainage and industrial reconversion of the area.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Meccanica, Matematica e Management, Politecnico di Bari, Viale Japigia 182, 70126, Bari, Italy

    Barbara Scozzi, Nicola Bellantuono & Pierpaolo Pontrandolfo

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  1. Barbara Scozzi
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  2. Nicola Bellantuono
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  3. Pierpaolo Pontrandolfo
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Correspondence to Barbara Scozzi.

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Scozzi, B., Bellantuono, N. & Pontrandolfo, P. Managing Open Innovation in Urban Labs. Group Decis Negot 26, 857–874 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10726-017-9524-z

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