Moving beyond Smart Cities: Digital Nations for Social Innovation & Sustainability

The next step after smart cities is the creation of digital or smart nations. A digital nation requires a national transformation across diverse institutions including the urban and rural areas of a society. Besides diverse social innovation initiatives, sustainability is a key aspect, so that rather than greenfield projects, long-term solutions will involve brownfield, smart city projects. A digital transformation to a digital or smart nation requires a great deal of innovation in planning, process re-engineering and execution. Whereas research work and policy actions are traditionally focused on a city level, these efforts need to be widened to the national level. Existing city-scale theories and frameworks may be used and adapted to meet the larger-scale needs of the future smart nations. The new issues and research challenges which arise need to be addressed through interdisciplinary approaches. This special issue on the theme of digital nations attempts to address the need in the academic literature to provide a better understanding of digital nations.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Information and Communication Technolog