This paper contributes to the literature on living labs, innovation ecosystems, and the
transformation to smart and sustainable cities by exploring the use of a trans-city
data integration platform on the smart city programs Smart Dublin and Turin City
Lab. Research on living labs and innovation ecosystems is growing and showing
increasing interest in the urban scale and the development of smart cities. For the
density and interconnectedness of actors and resources, smart cities are believed
the perfect grounds for technological and social experimentation, and they may
catalyze the transformation toward smart, sustainable, and inclusive societies.
Crucially, this requires systematically collecting massive amounts of data from a
multiplicity of local stakeholders. While research has often highlighted the
opportunities and challenges related to this data collection at the city level, almost
no study has yet investigated the potential of aggregating and integrating data from
multiple cities via a common infrastructure. This explorative study aims at addressing
this gap. Focusing on the smart city programs of Dublin and Turin, it fosters the
conceptualization of trans-city data integration platforms and explores their
applicability to two real-life smart city living labs. This was achieved by adopting the
Quadruple Helix model of innovation, and then by qualitatively analyzing the two
smart city programs and 53 subprojects. It was found that initiatives from Smart
Dublin and the Torino City Lab display thematic overlaps and complementarities.
Hence, this contributes to the existing literature by showing that a common
infrastructure for data collection may be developed. Moreover, it informs policy
makers and practitioners on the importance of collecting data that could be easily
integrated also across geographies, so as to lead to major advantages of scale in
the future