Rethinking Public Value Co-Creation in Smart City Ecosystems: A Meta-Analysis of Smart City Case Studies

Despite the supply-side smart city innovation stimuli and smart digital technology investments, extant smart city research is unclear about whether or not they produced better and smarter cities with realized benefits and values for the public. This paper drew on Moore’s framework for creating public value as the theoretical lens to undertake qualitative meta-analysis of 30 most highly cited smart city case study papers. The meta-analysis results found an overall lack of public value focus and realized benefits of the smart city initiatives. The lack of public value focus is more evident in ten of the case study papers which did not mention city names. The paper identified key enablers and inhibitors of public value co-creation in the contemporary smart city ecosystems environments. It then outlined the future research agenda, including a theoretical extension to the Moore’s framework by explicating two governance mechanisms underpinning the government’s public value co-creation process