Smart cities and innovative governance systems: a reflection on urban living labs and action research

Urban Living Labs (ULL) are sites that allow different urban actors to design, test and learn from socio-technical innovations. In this article, I investigate the epistemological roots of ULL, claiming that this new instrument in the realm of urban planning strongly relies on action research, a methodology designed in the 1940s. I explore to what extent ULL and action research are different, identifying past obstacles of action research to design more successful ULL. This paper establishes that ULL are a key element to implement social innovation and that social innovation should lead technological innovation and the recent smart city model to promote smart sustainable cities. The article was prepared in the aftermath of the project “ROCK” (2017–2020) on cultural heritage as a driver for urban regeneration, where ULL played a central role being highly relevant in the context of urban regeneration policies. Key findings support that ULL can contribute to finding a balance between top-down and bottom-up strategies and its comparative qualitative analysis would improve the methodology. Moreover, public and private cooperation should be encouraged and government should lead and act as a key player in innovation strategies. Lastly, geography can contribute to these new challenges by framing past approaches, projecting the future of cities, and finding ways to make them become a reality.

Decision Making, Interest Intermediation, and Value: In Government, Public, and Private Agencies Corporatism for Work Promotion

This paper analysis decision making, interest intermediation, and value in the realm of government, public and private cooperation under corporatism to enable young third-country immigrants’ transition to work in Austria, Finland and the Czech Republic. Based on document analysis, this paper concludes a centralized delegation of authority, interest intermediations, and public values administrative devices in corporatism governance with democratic deficit that steer young third-country immigrants transition to work. However, the Czech Republic is dissimilar to Austria and Finland with the focus on relationship and partnership cooperation pattern to build contacts, where as Finland and Austria prefer cooperation in the form of coordinating varying employment objectives. The outcome points to deliberate democracy in neoliberal market-oriented setting. This is relevance to bureaucratic accountability and performance monitoring, but imperative to operational risk that may not only impair vulnerable people's belongings, but jeopardize public value accountability, sustainable finance and democratic values.

Optimal Transition toward Innovation-led Sustainable Governance under the 2020 Paris Regime

This Special Issue consists of selected papers from the 2019 Sustainable Asia Conference (SAC), an annual international conference held at the Anhui University of Finance and Economics, Bengbu, China, in June of 2019, and the 12th Sustainable Asia Conference held at Inha University, Incheon, Korea, in October of 2019. SAC is one of the leading international conferences for presenting novel and fundamental advances in sustainable development issues for Asia. Evidently, sustainable development urgently requires public and private cooperation for the challenges faced across diverse fields of activities because of the complex procedure of enactment. Northeast Asian countries are very sensitive to this matter because of the strong leadership of their governments, and thus, it is of utmost importance to develop sustainable governance mechanisms. Government-led political regulations could be much more important in Asia, but without the strong support of the private sector, they cannot be sustainable. We have already seen many policy failures in Asian countries during this initial stage of ecological civilization. Therefore, this Special Issue proposes the workable mechanism for sustainable development in diverse perspectives. This Special Issue focuses on diverse yet unique issues for sustainable development and its governance under the Paris regime in 2020.

Tools for the development of innovative entrepreneurship in the region

The article is devoted to the problems of innovative enterprise development. Since the Russian economy is in a state of financial and economic stagnation, there is a need to apply radically new innovative directions of business activities that ensure the effective use of financial potential within the framework of national projects. Practice shows that today the business sector in Russia is not able to provide a full-fledged demand for new technologies. Therefore, there is a need for substantial state support to provide centralized orders for high-tech industries. There are already examples of combining the efforts of a number of Autonomous economic entities to implement innovative reforms, new organizational forms of interaction have been formed, such as: centers for the implementation of innovative ideas; centers for engineering services; business incubators, etc. The subjects of these organizational forms of cooperation developed and proposed measures aimed at innovative solution of technological problems relevant to the regional economy, as well as for the country as a whole. Link for the efficient interaction of economic agents becomes an inherent characteristic, is the need of implementation of mechanisms of coordination with “network interaction”. It is important to note the fact that the existing relations and forms of regulation of various systems are not permanent, there are no strategic concepts aimed at long-term public and private cooperation.

Policy on the Development of Immunization Tracking Systems

The American Academy of Pediatrics in its role as advocate for children supports public and private cooperation in the development of immunization tracking systems (ITSs) insofar as they benefit children. All ITSs as they are developed: • Should prospectively articulate their goals and desired outcomes, including documenting immunization status and the mechanics of immunization, increasing rates of immunization, decreasing cost of immunization, and facilitating immunization opportunities; • Must accurately document each child's current immunization status; • Must preserve children's and their health care provider's right to confidentiality; • Should ensure that data will be available to health care providers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so that health care providers can take advantage of all opportunities to immunize; • Should ensure that data will not be used for sanctions against health care providers; • Must ensure that data input and access mechanisms enable providers to supply and access data easily, without having to purchase specialized hardware or expensive software; input and access software mechanisms need to enable all providers to supply data to and retrieve data from the ITS; • Should entitle health care providers to be reimbursed or the cost of providing data to the ITS; • Must ensure that data reflecting evidence of incomplete immunizations will not be used to deny a child access to care or eligibility for benefits by any insurance plan; • Must be studied and/or evaluated to determine their effectiveness at increasing immunization rates and decreasing costs; if such systems do not fulfill these goals, they should be eliminated; and