Open Data initiatives are increasingly considered as defining elements of emerging smart cities. However, few studies have attempted to provide a better understanding of the nature of this convergence and the impact on both domains. This paper presents findings from a detailed study of 18 open data initiatives across five smart cities – Barcelona, Chicago, Manchester, Amsterdam and Helsinki. Specifically, the study sought to understand how open data programs are shaped by the different smart cities contexts and concomitantly what kinds of innovations are enabled by open data in these cities. The findings highlight the specific impacts of open data innovation on the different smart cities domains, governance of the cities, and the nature of datasets available in the open data ecosystem.

1. A Tale of Open Data Innovations
in Five Smart Cities
Adegboyega Ojo, Edward Curry, Fatemeh Ahmadi-Zeleti
Insight Centre for Data Analytics
National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG), Rep. of Ireland
{adegboyega.ojo, ed.curry, fatemeh.ahmadizeleti}@insight-centre.org
2015 48th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
5 - 8, January, 2015, Grand Hyatt, Kauai

2. Background: City - Data Convergence
o Open data central to open innovations in cities
o Open data is powering a new civic movement that is changing the way citizens
experience cities (http://www.data.gov/cities/)
http://www.dublindashboard.ie/pages/index http://amsterdamsmartcity.com/projects/detail/id/
68/slug/smart-citysdk

3. Background - Waves of Open Data
Innovation Approach
Networks
of Civic
Innovation
Offices
Need-
driven
Programs
Hack
Events
“Direct” engagement of residents, city managers, other stakeholders
Freedom for bottom up innovation, techno-centric with “token”-level
participation of city management and residents
+t

4. Wave 1 Exemplar – Dutch Open
Hackathon
Available datasets including airport shuttle bus events, job
data, flight data, supermarket, order etc.
http://www.dutchopen
hackathon.com

5. Wave 2 Exemplar –
Summer of Smart in San Francisco
Engage mayoral candidates in
San Francisco (2011) on
solutions by Hack Teams to
pressing problems in areas
including 1) Community
Development, 2) Buildings.
Transportation and
Sustainability, 3) Public
Health, Food and Nutrition
Focus is on real needs and
involvement of major
stakeholders in solutions
Source: http://www.summerofsmart.org/home/

6. Wave 3 Example :
New Urban Mechanics
Boston
UtahPhilly
A Network of civic innovation
offices in Boston, Philadelphia
and Utah.
Each of the innovation offices
serve as the in-house research
and development group for the
respective mayors.
They build partnerships between
internal agencies and outside
entrepreneurs to pilot projects
that address the needs of
residentshttp://newurbanmechanics.org

7. The Challenge
o Bottom up open innovation activities generate relatively low number
of commercially viable and sustainable solution
o How to scale Civic city innovation initiatives like Code for America,
Code for Europe etc.
o How to continue to pursue “out of the box” bottom up innovation
while directly addressing concrete need of city residents?
o There are yet no codified patterns of good practices with respect of
open Innovations in Smart Cities.
o Poor understanding of how open data programs are shaped by the
smart city context and the kinds of innovations enabled by open data
in cities.
[Source: Townsend 2013]

8. Research Questions - 1
1) How does open data
program impact the smart
city context?
2) How does the smart city
program shape its
associated open data
initiatives?

9. Research Questions 2
Q1. How open data initiatives impacts smart city program
a) What smart city domains are impacted by open data initiatives?
b) What kinds of open engagement (including governance activities)
are enabled by open data in the associated smart city?
Q2. How smart city program shapes open data initiatives?
a) What datasets are available in the open data ecosystem?
b) What additional actors are engaged in in the open data ecosystem?

10. Approach 1 – “SCID” as underlying
conceptual Framework
SCID Framework:
A Smart City Initiative
Development Framework
developed from the
studies of smart city
programs in 10 countries.
Links Smart City
initiatives to concrete
city domains and
associated stakeholders
A. Ojo, E. Curry, T. Janowski, Designing Next Generation Smart City
initiatives, ECIS 2014, Isreal

11. Approach 2 - Method
o Data sources – secondary, captured from information available
online about the smart city programs of selected cities
o Analysis – qualitative, using content analysis approach, codes for
initiatives, impact types, stakeholders, etc. Coding categories are
derived directly from the text data
o Case selection – 3 criteria used to select the cases
1) It must have a well-developed smart city program
2) The city strongly promotes OD initiatives as SCs initiatives
3) Availability of significant information on OD initiatives
Carried out between Feb – May 2014, 18 initiatives selected after
careful analysis of initiatives

12. Approach 3 – City Cases
The five cities selected include: Chicago (US-3), Helsinki (Finland-5),
Amsterdam (Netherlands-4), Barcelona (Spain-2) and Manchester (UK-4)

13. Results - Impact (Q1)
Governance and Economic Domains standout …

14. Results - Impact (Q1)
Domain Impact Patterns
Economy Creation of marketplace for society
relevant applications;
Availability of data products and
services based on city operational
data and;
Scaling up the adoption of open
data innovations across city
functions through tools provision.
Education Availability of innovative digital
services for the education domain.
Energy Availability of innovative digital
services for the education domain.
Environment Greener environment.
Governance Better information sharing; open
innovation for co-created services;
open engagement in policy and
decision making; and interoperation
within city-network.
Tourism Co-created services based on
available open data.
Transportation Better City Park Management; and
Shorter transit time for commuters.

15. Results – Governance Mechanisms (Q1)
Five governance mechanisms are discernible from initiatives:
1) Collaboration – enabling collaboration between city and stakeholders
2) Participation – enabling participation of residents and developers
3) Communication – enable better policy outcomes through publication of
relevant data
4) Data exchange – Enabling data sharing among city authorities and
network of cities
5) Service and application integration – to provide software development
tools (e.g. CitySDK) to build OD-based applications

16. Results – Data Ecosystem (Q2)
Specific datasets that are associated with major SCs domains –
number of datasets include in the ff sectors:
1) Transport and Mobility – OpenStreetMapdata, CurrentCarParks…
2) Health and wellbeing – UKFoodHygiene, DrugTreatmentStatistics…
3) Environment and safety – FloodMap, EnergyUsage…
4) Education – CookCOunty, AdultEducation…
5) Tourism – Cultural and Leisure…
“Our findings on the published datasets across these cities show they in general cover the
innovation and social clusters of the so-called datasets of high-value provided in [58].
However, we observe more focus on Transport and mobility as well as Environment and
safety datasets, which are both characterised as innovation cluster data.”

17. Results – Stakeholders (Q2)
Major observation:
o Interestingly, significantly fewer stakeholder categories than in
typical smart cities program are observed!
o This is consistent with the view that most of the analysed
initiatives adopted bottom up open innovation
“Open Data Ecosystems in these cities have the active participation
of residents, different city authorities, software developers, and
SMEs in providing, curating and consuming the datasets … ”
Participation of non-technical stakeholders are minimal – “token”

18. Major Findings
Two significant findings from this study:
1) Emerging 2nd generation open data based smart city initiatives
are redefining the respective cities as “Open Innovation
Economies”. This is significantly different from the emphasis of
first generation initiatives with are strongly linked to physical
environment and infrastructure.
2) Need-driven open data initiatives in smart cities such as those
described earlier are exceptions

19. Conclusion
1) There are still huge potentials and gaps on how open data can
impact smart cities aspects. In particular, need driven,
stakeholder-led data driven innovation programs are still
relatively few.
2) There are currently no rigourous model to fully analyse this
opportunity gap. We are currently investigating such models.
3) Interviews and discussions with City Managers and Open data
program officers in cities may explain and identifies barriers to
need-driven approaches in open data projects in smart cities.

20. Thank you!
Q&A

21. Future work
o De-construction of Smart cities and Open data
programs and applying strategic alignment model to
exploit the opportunities.
o The approach will be similar to the strategic alignment
approach used in Organization-IT alignment