Innovation, Creative Industries, and Modern Cities: What Role Do Stakeholders Play in Driving Urban Innovation?

Assoc. Prof. Burak Özdoğan

• 05.06.2024

Innovation, Creative Industries, and Modern Cities: What Role Do Stakeholders Play in Driving Urban Innovation?

Innovation is like a magical wand that all cosmopolitan cities worldwide strive to attain. For modern cities today, innovation is the key to attracting talents that can ignite the future, transforming the city with knowledge and skills and creating unprecedented economic added value. Historically, cities have been the meeting points for businesses, economic activities, and people who bring these activities to life, reflecting the spirit of the era. Today, cities have transformed into entities that need to be managed like companies, competing with other cities to gain a larger share of the economic pie and provide prosperity for the residents.

The relationship established with the trio of economic added value, innovation, and prosperity also indicates how a city will spend the next decades. However, innovation does not sprout and grow on its own; it thrives with good soil, care, and planning. In this regard, the adequacy of the infrastructure provided by the city alone will not ensure the realization of innovation. Innovation is a human endeavor, and like every endeavor involving humans, elements such as relationships, common interests, the ability to act together, and sharing must also be ideally present. Innovation naturally produces highly technical, even mechanical goods and services. However, behavioral factors play a major role in its creation process.

One of the ways to reach the goals by using the behavioral factors in the process of creating innovation as a driving force is cluster. Sectoral clustering efforts, which bring together interconnected companies and institutions in a particular field, are among the most effective models to trigger innovation globally, as evidenced by academic studies. In particular, Porter is well-known for his work in this field. A 2021 study by Moretti, which used almost 110,000 data points, was published in the American Economic Review. It demonstrated that high-tech clusters have a major effect on the productivity of businesses.

In addition to uniting industry participants to stimulate group effort, industrial clusters encourage cooperative competition called as coopetition, which speeds up the development of innovative concepts and initiatives. Clusters have the effect of transforming the perspective of entrepreneurs in the city, revitalizing co-creation, and strengthening creative innovations (Hervas-Oliver, 2021).

With the active support of local stakeholders like the Izmir Development Agency and ESBAŞ, Izmir, a city that has historically developed with traditional economic models as an agricultural, tourism, and industrial city, has been working towards a desired talent and competence-based economic production model, especially in the last decade.  

While transitioning to more sustainable models in industry, such as green transformation, wind, and solar energy, the city is also continuing its efforts towards a desired economic production model based on talent and competence in information and communication technologies. But as I have said before, knowledge-based innovation, software, high technology, and creative industries like gaming all depend on teamwork to advance. Clusters' primary strength is their ability to bring together a wide range of stakeholders. In other words, by bringing together organizations such as universities, academics, industry representatives, and local government officials alongside businesses, clusters foster innovation by uniting these groups around a shared objective. The greatest challenge of clustering lies in the previous sentence: bringing together such a wide range of stakeholder groups and ensuring the formation of an ideal cluster, is one of the most challenging parts.

Overcoming this challenge, hosting innovation-based economic activities desired by modern cities worldwide, and achieving the goals of changing intensive industrial activities with intelligence power by bringing creative works to the city center requires clustering efforts, the power of the city's network, the cooperation capacity, and the efforts of opinion leaders willing to make efforts in this area. In this context, under the leadership of ESBAŞ CEO, Dr. Faruk Güler and BSN Consultancy Chairman, Bilgen Salih Narlı, the Software and Information Industry Cluster Association was established in 2021 in Izmir. The study and suggestions developed within the framework of the 2019 research project conducted by the Izmir Development Agency to expand the software ecosystem in Izmir served as the foundation for this endeavor. Since its founding, a diverse range of industry stakeholders, including universities, accelerator programs, technology development zones, entrepreneurs, and public entities, have joined the organization as members.

With the strength of industrial clustering, YABİSAK, an Izmir-based organization, is evolving into a framework that unites all stakeholders and reveals the Aegean Region's potential for high innovation-based growth and economic added value. As a result, competition shifts from a local to a global scale, merging successful businesses that prioritize high technology and innovation with infrastructure prospects that meet the social needs of the qualified human resources targeted by the sector. By doing so, YABİSAK significantly contributes to the competitiveness and international recognition of the ICT sector in Izmir and the Aegean Region, while also revealing the inventive potential of local businesses.

Without a doubt, the continuity and sustainability of the network that YABİSAK builds, the co-creation culture, and the willingness of all parties involved to support the stated objectives will determine the program's success. As things stand, the initial outcomes of YABİSAK's transformational impact inspire optimism and anticipation for long-term future effects.

Assoc. Prof. Burak Özdoğan

YABİSAK Academic Advisor

References

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20191277

Hervás-Oliver, J.L. (2021), “Industry 4.0 in industrial districts: regional innovation policy for the Toy Valley district in Spain”, Regional Studies, Vol. 55 Nos 10/11, pp. 1775-1786.