Green and digital entrepreneurship in smart cities

Article  -  Friday, 25 March 2022

Manjon, M., Aouni, Z., Crutzen, N.: "Green and digital entrepreneurship in smart cities", The Annals of Regional Science

This paper investigates the relationship between the implementation of smart city initiatives and the number of new firms, paying special attention to the rates of green and digital entrepreneurship as smart cities tend to follow sustainable and/or digital orientations.

We find evidence of a positive (causal) relation between smart city initiatives and entrepreneurship rates in a sample of Belgian municipalities, particularly when these initiatives follow a bottom-up approach and/or the level of implementation is high. In contrast, having sustainable and/or digital orientations in smart city initiatives does not generally make any difference in the rates of entrepreneurship, the exception being the digital rates in large municipalities.

These results suggest that the smart city initiatives may be acting as a local entrepreneurship-supporting policy. They also support the view that smart cities are mainly (but not only) associated with technological developments (in large cities).

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