Di Fan, Yiyi Su, Xinli Huang

Public Administration Review, 82(4): 764-770, 2022

Recommend Reason

The essay suggests viewpoints on how innovative cities can be cultivated and fertilized via urban governance and public administration. First, since cities are well recognized as innovation hubs or innovation machines, innovative cities are not born; rather they can be crafted through configuring institutional arrangements. We therefore suggest a governance-centric perspective that entails multiple stakeholders in city innovation. Second, the proposed CELL framework can be used as a policy toolkit by state and urban public administrators to analyze the development of a particular city, and further promote urban innovation performance. Given the causal complexity indicated by the CELL framework, we assert that multiple institutional structures that reach the same or similar levels of high innovation performance can co-exist. Last but not least, a specific set of institutional arrangements for city innovation not only affects the upgrade of dynamic capabilities and the improvement of the competitiveness of these cities, but also acts on boosting local economies, enhancing public services, and, more importantly, rejuvenating the public’s life quality.

About the Author

Di Fan, Swinburne University of Technology

Yiyi Su, School of Economics and Management, Tongji University

Xinli Huang, WU Vienna University of Economics & Business

Keywords

innovative cities, institutional arrangements, the CELL framework, governance

Brief Introduction

How can innovative cities be cultivated and fertilized? Embracing and reframing insights from multidisciplinary academic discourse, we conceptualize three paired tensional dimensions, namely, the human-society, the market-government and the global–local tensions, to form a six-I city innovation framework. Also termed a CELL framework, the six I-related key elements are: human intelligence, societal incentives, government involvement, market inclination, global integration, and local interconnection. Taking a holistic view, the set of collective and interdependent institutional elements can serve to analyze the development of city innovation. The key assertion of the study is that a city’s innovative ecosystem can be built up, and, more importantly, via configuring key institutional arrangements.