Region-specific Institutional Context for Citizen-driven Entrepreneurship in Smart Cities: Evidence from Rome and Berlin

During the last decades, the notion of smart cities emerges as one of the key concepts for improving urban areas and including citizens in entrepreneurship activities. The smart city concept should be considered as a multidimensional activity which is carefully balancing human, social, cultural, economic, environmental, and technological aspects to engage citizens to make urban change. The objective of this study is to question the role of citizen entrepreneurship in smart city development and analyse frameworks, strategic actions, and public policies which stipulate it. High levels of application of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and novel digital platforms enable numerous multiplicative benefits and allow the provision of innovative services, shifting our vocabulary to ’‘digital’ and ’‘smart’ services. With the proliferation of the concept of smart cities and disruptive digital tools, it is the entrepreneurs that stimulate the technological development of the cities to become smart. In this paper, the authors have analysed specific public policies that foster citizen entrepreneurship in Rome and Berlin smart cities concepts with the objectives of assessing types and depth of strategic actions that foster citizen-driven entrepreneurship and highlight the differences in frameworks and taxonomies in these two cities.