Come dovrebbero essere sviluppati i progetti di social innovation nelle smart city? Un’analisi comparativa

In the last years, the phenomenon of Smart City has emerged as a way to mitigate citizens’ problems, often through the development of new technologies and innovation with social purpose. In fact, the economic crisis of recent times has created not only tough challenges, but also many opportunities to improve the quality of life of citizens. At the same time, it fostered collaboration between public and private actors to find new solutions to social problems within Smart City and many Social Innovation Projects have been developed through public-private partnership (PPP). However, the management of these partnerships presents atypical features and obstacles hard to overcome. Moreover, it emerges the necessity to conceive this kind of projects within the whole ecosystem in which they take place. Therefore, due to the uncertainty of the market and of the peculiarities of Smart City Projects, there is a need to rethink how to manage these partnerships and, at the same time, how to develop useful ecosystems for social innovation. So, this paper aims to shed light on a topic that has created great interest in the political, social and academic environment through a comparative analysis of two Social Innovation Projects in the Smart City context, supported through public-private partnerships.