• Intangible asset management: Course participant will be equipped with analytical skills for managing intangible assets in urban business contexts. The student awarded the highest mark should be able to apply a limited number of key concepts, analytical approaches and theories for value creation by using intangible assets (such as organizational leadership and access to urban business systems).
• Innovation economics: Critically reflect on the growing body of knowledge on smart city development through innovation, entrepreneurship and city-based business development. He or she will know how cities can be defined in economically functional terms rather than in spatial terms only. The participant should be able to engage in an evidence-based discourse on urban business development.
• Policy analysis: As future manager the student will be able to understand policies by city governments that benefit from interactions with business enterprises such as real estate developers, with managers at universities and R&D centers, with civic institutions and organized interest groups among citizens.
• Practical insights and know-how: The student will explore case studies on electromobility (with related infrastructure), city logistics, urban resilience strategies and alternative resource consumption. Examples provided are ICT-based solutions for mutual urban planning; Big Data for managing energy, water and waste; and design and prototyping of new citizens’ services.

This course is on business development, social and other entrepreneurship, and innovation environments in cities. Special attention is put on so-called ‘smart cities’ adapting to digital technology solutions. The ‘smart city’ notion has displaced ‘sustainable city’ and ‘digital city’ as the words of choice to denote advanced urban infrastructure based on mobile and fixed information and communications technology (ICT).

Smart cities evolve along with business-driven value creation through the intermediation of public-private partnerships, cross-sectoral collaboration, city-led “open innovation” marketplaces for public services and other modes of governance. More generally, ICT applications empower consumers in the urban marketplace as well as citizens in the wider society. The course participants will be introduced to a series of smart city business cases at the level of the firm, at the level of the city or of the city district as well as at the regional level.

Special attention in the course will be placed at new collaborative spaces within the urban fabric. Increasingly, a rising number of startups and innovative firms, along with entrepreneurs and young professionals, congregate in compact, resourceful enclaves in the smart city. They tend to co-locate with other firms, R&D labs and universities in order to share ideas, co-produce new solutions and engage in “open innovation” activities.

Third Generation Science Parks, business incubators and dedicated urban innovation districts are organized manifestations of mega-trends altering the location preferences of people and firms more to the center of the city. Science parks across Europe are being urbanized and moved to central city areas.

Within such urban contexts, the course participants will explore business firms and entrepreneurial organizations that master intangible assets (‘hidden resources and capabilities’) when shaping strategy, managing innovation and incremental change for the purpose of creating value.

This course represents a contribution also to the ‘science of cities’, which is emerging as an inter-disciplinary field of study and related business practices. New concepts, models and analytical approaches are being tested against an increasingly complex economic reality.

From a management perspective, the course participants will be offered a variety of analytical approaches to identify, measure and assess intangibles in business firms and other organizations and in collaborative networks among companies. We will discuss how to put intangibles into effective use, thereby also promoting more ‘knowledge-intensive’ or ‘intelligent’ organizations to succeed in a swiftly changing urban environment, which could be highly competitive and well-connected to world markets. Emphasis is put on methods of managing intangible resources and capabilities in large corporations and in public institutions as well as in small and medium-sized business enterprises, including start-up firms.

Moreover, the course is practical in orientation by the exploration of case material from comparative studies of firms and supporting institutions in different types of innovation districts in cities on three continents. Case material is drawn from smart city business environments in Barcelona and Milano, Copenhagen and Stockholm, London and Birmingham, Shanghai and Shenzhen, Chengdu and Harbin, Singapore and Saigon, Boston and New York. Here, ICT companies are investing heavily in the development of technology advancing new smart city services. In these cities, many enterprises tend to take a great interest in their locally based and globally networked markets. 

Examples of readings: