Abstract. Cities nowadays face complex challenges to meet objectives regarding socio-economic development and quality of life. The concept of "smart cities" is a response to these challenges. This paper explores "smart cities" as environments of open and user-driven innovation for experimenting and validating Future Internet-enabled services. Based on an analysis of the current landscape of smart city pilot programmes, Future Internet experimentally-driven research and projects in the domain of Living Labs, common resources regarding research and innovation can be identified that can be shared in open innovation environments. Effectively sharing these common resources for the purpose of establishing urban and regional innovation ecosystems requires sustainable partnerships and cooperation strategies among the main stakeholders. Keywords: Smart Cities, Future Internet, Collaboration, Innovation Ecosystems, User Co-Creation, Living Labs, Resource Sharing The concept of "smart cities" has attracted considerable attention in the context of urban development policies. The Internet and broadband network technologies as enablers of e-services become more and more important for urban development while cities are increasingly assuming a critical role as drivers of innovation in areas such as health, inclusion, environment and business [1] . Therefore the issue arises of how cities, surrounding regions and rural areas can evolve towards sustainable open and user-driven innovation ecosystems to boost Future Internet research and experimentation for user-driven services and how they can accelerate the cycle of research, inno- vation and adoption in real-life environments. This paper pays particular attention to collaboration frameworks which integrate elements such as Future Internet testbeds and Living Lab environments that establish and foster such innovation ecosystems. The point of departure is the definition which states that a city may be called 'smart' "when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory government" [2] . This holistic definition nicely balances different economic and social demands as well as the needs implied in urban development, while also encompassing peripheral and less developed cities. It also emphasises the process of economic recovery for welfare and well-being purposes. Secondly, this characterisation implicitly builds upon the role of the Internet and Web 2.0 as potential enablers of urban welfare creation through social participation, for addressing hot societal challenges, such as energy efficiency, environment and health. Whereas until now the role of cities and regions in ICT-based innovation mostly focused on deploying broadband infrastructure [3] , the stimulation of ICT-based applications enhancing citizens' quality of life is now becoming a key priority. As a next step, the potential role of cities as innovation environments is gaining recognition [4] . The current European Commission programmes FP7-ICT and CIP ICT-PSP stimulate experimentation into the smart cities concept as piloting user-driven open innovation environments. The implicit aim of such initiatives is to mobilise cities and urban areas as well as rural and regional environments as agents for change, and as environments of "democratic innovation" [5] . Increasingly, cities and urban areas are considered not only as the object of innovation but also as innovation ecosystems empowering the collective intelligence and co-creation capabilities of user/citizen communities for designing innovative living and working scenarios. Partnerships and clear cooperation strategies among main stakeholders are needed in order to share research and innovation resources such as experimental technology platforms, emerging ICT tools, methodologies and know-how, and user communities for experimentation on Future Internet technologies and e-service applications. Common, shared research and innovation resources as well as cooperation models providing access to such resources will constitute the future backbone of urban innovation environments for exploiting the opportunities provided by Future Internet technologies. Three perspectives are addressed in this paper in order to explore the conditions for rising to this challenge (see Table 1 ). The first perspective of Future Internet research and experimentation represents a technology-oriented and longer term contribution to urban innovation ecosystems. Cities and urban areas provide a potentially attractive testing and validating environment. However, a wide gap exists between the technology orientation of Future Internet research and the needs and ambitions of cities. Hence, the second perspective is comprised of city and urban development policies. City policy-makers, citizens and enterprises are primarily interested in concrete and short-term solutions, benefiting business creation, stimulation of SMEs and social participation. While many cities have initiated ICT innovation programmes to stimulate business and societal applications, scaling-up of pilot projects to large-scale, real-life deployment is nowadays crucial. Therefore, a third perspective is the concept of open and user-driven innovation ecosystems, which are close to the interests and needs of cities and their stakeholders, including citizens and businesses, and which may bridge the gap between short-term city development priorities and longer term technological research and experimentation. A key challenge is the development of cooperation frameworks and synergy linkages between Future internet research, urban development policies and open userdriven innovation. Elements of such frameworks include sharing of and access to diverse sets of knowledge resources and experimentation facilities; using innovative procurement policies to align technology development and societal challenges; and establishing open innovation models to create sustainable cooperation. The concept of open and user-driven innovation looks well positioned to serve as a mediating, exploratory and participative playground combining Future Internet push and urban policy pull in demand-driven cycles of experimentation and innovation. Living Labdriven innovation ecosystems may evolve to constitute the core of "4P" (PublicPrivate-People-Partnership) ecosystems providing opportunities to citizens and businesses to co-create, explore, experiment and validate innovative scenarios based on technology platforms such as Future Internet experimental facilities involving SMEs and large companies as well as stakeholders from different disciplines. This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 addresses challenges for cities to exploit the opportunities of the Future Internet and of Living Lab-innovation ecosystems. How methodologies of Future Internet experimentation and Living Labs could constitute the innovation ecosystems of smart cities is discussed in section 3. Initial examples of such ecosystems and related collaboration models are presented in section 4. Finally, section 5 presents conclusions and an outlook. In the early 1990s the phrase "smart city" was coined to signify how urban development was turning towards technology, innovation and globalisation [6] . meet the challenges of cities within a global knowledge economy [7] . However, the more recent interest in smart cities can be attributed to the strong concern for sustainability, and to the rise of new Internet technologies, such as mobile devices (e.g. smart phones), the semantic web, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things (IoT) promoting real world user interfaces. The concept of smart cities seen from the perspective of technologies and components has some specific properties within the wider cyber, digital, smart, intelligent cities literatures. It focuses on the latest advancements in mobile and pervasive computing, wireless networks, middleware and agent technologies as they become embedded into the physical spaces of cities. The emphasis on smart embedded devices represents a distinctive characteristic of smart cities compared to intelligent cities, which create territorial innovation systems combining knowledge-intensive activities, institutions for cooperation and learning, and web-based applications of collective intelligence [8, 9] . Cyber cities, from cyberspace, cybernetics, governance and control spaces based on information feedback, city governance; but also meaning the negative / dark sides of cyberspace, cybercrime, tracking, identification, military control over cities. Digital cities, from digital representation of cities, virtual cities, digital metaphor of cities, cities of avatars, second life cities, simulation (sim) city. Intelligent cities, from the new intelligence of cities, collective intelligence of citizens, distributed intelligence, crowdsourcing, online collaboration, broadband for innovation, social capital of cities, collaborative learning and innovation, people-driven innovation. Smart cities, from smart phones, mobile devices, sensors, embedded systems, smart environments, smart meters, and instrumentation sustaining the intelligence of cities. It is anticipated that smart city solutions, with the help of instrumentation and interconnection of mobile devices, sensors and actuators allowing real-world urban data to be collected and analysed, will improve the ability to forecast and manage urban flows and push the collective intelligence of cities forward [10] . Smart and intelligent cities have this modernisation potential because they are not events in the cybersphere, but integrated social, physical, institutional, and digital spaces, in which digital components improve the functioning of socio-economic activities, and the management of physical infrastructures of cities, while also enhancing the problemsolving capacities of urban communities. The most urgent challenge of smart city environments is to address the problems and development priorities of cities within a global and innovation-led world. A recent public consultation held by the European Commission [11] on the major urban and regional development challenges in the EU has identified three main priorities for the future cohesion policy after 2013. It appears that competitiveness will remain at the heart of cohesion policy, in particular, research, innovation, and upgrading of skills to promote the knowledge economy. Active labour market policy is a top priority to sustain employment, strengthen social cohesion and reduce the risk of poverty. Other hot societal issues are sustainable development, reducing greenhouse gases emissions and improving the energy efficiency of urban infrastructure. Smart city Smart Cities and the Future Internet 435 solutions are expected to deal with these challenges, sustain the innovation economy and wealth of cities, maintain employment and fight against poverty through employment generation, the optimisation of energy and water usage and savings, and by offering safer cities. However, to achieve these goals, city authorities have to undertake initiatives and strategies that create the physical-digital environment of smart cities, actualising useful applications and e-services, and assuring the long-term sustainability of smart cities through viable business models. The first task that cities must address in becoming smart is to create a rich environment of broadband networks that support digital applications. This includes: (1) the development of broadband infrastructure combining cable, optical fibre, and wireless networks, offering high connectivity and bandwidth to citizens and organisations located in the city, (2) the enrichment of the physical space and infrastructures of cities with embedded systems, smart devices, sensors, and actuators, offering realtime data management, alerts, and information processing, and (3) the creation of applications enabling data collection and processing, web-based collaboration, and actualisation of the collective intelligence of citizens. The latest developments in cloud computing and the emerging Internet of Things, open data, semantic web, and future media technologies have much to offer. These technologies can assure economies of scale in infrastructure, standardisation of applications, and turn-key solutions for software as a service, which dramatically decrease the development costs while accelerating the learning curve for operating smart cities. The second task consists of initiating large-scale participatory innovation processes for the creation of applications that will run and improve every sector of activity, city cluster, and infrastructure. All city economic activities and utilities can be seen as innovation ecosystems in which citizens and organisations participate in the development,
The technological complexity, as well as the complexity of the various sectorial services involved within a smart city, has been addressed by a formal approach to open architectures and platforms seeking the creation of global ecosystems, ensuring the interoperability and the creation of standard data models REF .
Smart cities and the future internet: towards cooperation frameworks for open innovation
Future Internet Assembly
Computer Science