Cities are trying to innovate but encounter all kinds of challenges. This ranges from collaboration with private parties to not understanding technology. The next web lecture presents how to move from data to innovation. Professor Marijn Janssen describes the typical challenges of sustainable smart city innovation and describes various forms of data-driven innovation projects.

Main Takeaways

• The innovation often takes place outside the city government, in this way having less control over the actual innovation.
• Organizational ambidexter refers to the ability to efficiently deal with today’s questions and being able to innovate to adapt to new societal needs.
• There exist two types of ambidexterity, contextual and structural ambidexterity. Contextual ambidexterity requires staff to switch between exploitation and exploration in the context of their day-to-day work.
• In the internally-driven strategy, organizations initiate various innovation programs to improve their administrative processes. In an externally-driven strategy phase, a separate department was created to innovate.