Dear Colleagues,

The global community is challenged by crises of a social, economic, and environmental nature, which invoke actions at different levels and in several directions: individual behaviours, collective practices, rules and norms at any scale, urban and national policies, international cooperation and agreements. Cities are one of the responsible actors for most of the global challenges but, at the same time, they represent a promising opportunity for the future (Amin and Thrift, 2012; Brescia and Marshall, 2016). They are population centres. They are knowledge and networks hubs (Gutzmer, 2016). They serve as first shelters for immigrant families and young professionals alike. They are fertile environments for commerce and innovation (Brescia and Marshall, 2016). From being quite passive participants to global efforts, cities are now asked to strongly contribute to the necessary complex transition towards sustainability.

This is clear in the Agenda 2030 (UN, 2015) Sustainable Development Goal 11: Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. SDG 11, indeed, sums up the great challenges cities must address in the future. Addressing such challenges requires the development of innovative solutions that, to be technically feasible and socially desirable (Checkland, 1985), as well as environmentally sustainable, would require the active involvement of the diverse urban stakeholders, the adoption of systemic, inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches and the ability, by the municipal and local authorities, to coordinate, manage and support the solution development and implementations processes (e.g., SDSN, 2015). The literature on open innovation (Chesbrough, 2006; Chesbrough and Bogers, 2014; West et al., 2014) could offer the conceptual and theoretical frameworks useful to guide and observe processes of solution development and implementation (e.g., Bellantuono et al., 2017). Such processes (can) take place by adopting different governance models, in which the diverse stakeholders may generate complex, open, and creative ecosystems, wherein innovative solutions are conceived, designed, experimented, implemented and, in some cases, supplied to the market and scaled up. An interesting feature of cities is that some stakeholders (who in general can collaborate even virtually, e.g., through a web platform) involved in the design phase of a sustainability solution actually live/act (in) the city and here are impacted by the innovation output. As a result, open innovation carried out by, for, and within cities may also reinforce the sense of belonging and civic engagement.

Being generative environments of complex and interconnected innovation ecosystems, cities represent a setting wherein the entire open innovation theoretical framework and attendant approaches can be verified and further developed (Almirall et al., 2014). Open innovation has indeed been developed and mainly adopted with reference to the business context, yet cities, as hubs of multilevel and multidisciplinary networks, involve a wider and more complex reality, so representing the melting pots for a rich completion and widening of open innovation.

This Special Issue aims to collect two different kinds of contributions:

• Articles describing how open innovation models, frameworks and findings can help address sustainability challenges within cities. They may include:
  • Research on a particular city sustainability challenge examined from the perspective of open innovation.
  • Conceptual and theoretical frameworks illustrating how open innovation can contribute to enhance the development of solutions to address sustainable development challenges in cities.
  • Empirical city sustainability research based on quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods, addressing and illustrating the benefits of drawing on open innovation. Cases analysed by adopting a process theory approach (e.g. Langley, 2009) are particularly welcomed.
  • Comparative and analytical studies on urban cases, projects and initiatives responding to sustainable challenges with open innovation approaches.
• Empirical cases of innovation projects concerning the sustainability of cities, which can provide useful insights into open innovation practices and methodologies. They may include:
  • Urban projects and initiatives that address global sustainability challenges and are able to describe or capture peculiar aspects of open innovation in urban environments. 
  • Specific solutions implemented or experimented in cities, which clearly represent the outputs (products or services) of open innovation processes oriented to global challenges and aiming at shifting towards sustainability.

Prof. Grazia Concilio
Prof. Pierpaolo Pontrandolfo
Prof. Barbara Scozzi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

• Open innovation
• Sustainable urban development
• Global challenges
• Urban innovation ecosystems