Trans-city data integration platforms: an explorative study on Smart Dublin and Torino City Lab

This paper contributes to the literature on living labs, innovation ecosystems, and the transformation to smart and sustainable cities by exploring the use of a trans-city data integration platform on the smart city programs Smart Dublin and Turin City Lab. Research on living labs and innovation ecosystems is growing and showing increasing interest in the urban scale and the development of smart cities. For the density and interconnectedness of actors and resources, smart cities are believed the perfect grounds for technological and social experimentation, and they may catalyze the transformation toward smart, sustainable, and inclusive societies. Crucially, this requires systematically collecting massive amounts of data from a multiplicity of local stakeholders. While research has often highlighted the opportunities and challenges related to this data collection at the city level, almost no study has yet investigated the potential of aggregating and integrating data from multiple cities via a common infrastructure. This explorative study aims at addressing this gap. Focusing on the smart city programs of Dublin and Turin, it fosters the conceptualization of trans-city data integration platforms and explores their applicability to two real-life smart city living labs. This was achieved by adopting the Quadruple Helix model of innovation, and then by qualitatively analyzing the two smart city programs and 53 subprojects. It was found that initiatives from Smart Dublin and the Torino City Lab display thematic overlaps and complementarities. Hence, this contributes to the existing literature by showing that a common infrastructure for data collection may be developed. Moreover, it informs policy makers and practitioners on the importance of collecting data that could be easily integrated also across geographies, so as to lead to major advantages of scale in the future.