Piloting Smart City Solutions in Very Small, Small and Medium-sized Municipalities. The Estonian case study.

Abstract

This paper focuses on a question of how to make innovative digital smart city solutions available for the very small, small and medium-size municipalities. The paper introduces as one potential approach, for reaching this goal, a Smart City (SC) idea competition and piloting initiative carried out in Estonia, involving very small towns, small cities and medium-sized cities. The article describes the process of identifying urban challenges and ranking them in collaboration with the representatives of municipalities, crowdsourcing innovative solutions to the identified most pressing problems through open international smart city (SC) idea competition and the selection of the winning piloting ideas. The results of the SC idea competition are analysed in the context of mission-oriented-innovation (MOI) and public value (PV) theory framework, in order to evaluate the winning SC pilot plans potential to have a positive impact and added PV for the local communities, improving their quality of life and sustainability.