Toli, Angeliki Maria; (2025) The smart city service ecosystem: Co-creation of value through alliancing-enabled resource integration. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The detrimental effects of rapid urbanization have led to the urgent need to reconstruct how cities operate and utilize resources. Smart cities have emerged as a possible solution towards more efficient urban environments. They are considered imperative for a sustainable future and have consequently evolved into a multibillion industry. While there is a plethora of research focusing on the technological and urban aspects of smart cities, there is a dearth of literature on the organisational and managerial issues arising by this rapidly emerging concept. Particularly, there is an identified gap in how and why smart city stakeholders collaborate between each other, leading to a restricted understanding of the mechanisms of value co-creation in smart cities. Via the lens of the service dominant logic, with a focus on resources, this research studies how diverse actor groups collaborate and integrate resources in order to deliver smart city projects -typically publicly funded multi-actor consortiums and alliances-. More specifically the research questions of this thesis is: how do actors within project alliances exchange and integrate resources to co-create value and what factors influence their interactions in the process of resource integration? This thesis is based on empirical evidence collected through qualitative interviews with 60 senior staff from representative organisations from all actor groups across 80 smart city projects. These were used to map the dyadic and triadic interactions that occur between organisations within the smart city ecosystem, that serves as a stepping stone towards responding to the research question. Findings of the study demonstrate the main resources exchanged within the smart city ecosystem, as well as the institutional arrangements that govern these exchanges and the strategic goals and intentions that underpin them. As value in smart cities is most commonly co-created in alliances, this study further focuses on the intricate dynamics between actors and their resource integration mechanisms. The theoretical contributions of these findings appertain to proposing the notion of quality of interactions as a determining factor of smart city ecosystem wellbeing, identifying critical resources and their contribution in creating opportunities of future value -future value propositions- and examining their accessibility, and introducing the service sub-ecosystem as level of analysis for the alliances. The practical contributions provide evidence-based guidance for the effective management of smart city organisations and consequently lead to managerial and organisational urban innovation, eventually leading to the improvement in citizen well-being and quality of life.

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