Collaboration before competition: how smart city entrepreneurs co-create temporary ecosystems to build capacity for learning

This article explores how smart city entrepreneurs (SCEs) learn to address urban sustainability challenges with innovative digital products and services. SCEs embody social, digital, and urban entrepreneurialism features and play a pivotal role in advancing smart city development. But despite their importance, little is known about the knowledge, skills, and competencies required to become an SCE. Grounded in entrepreneurial learning theory, our study helps fill this gap. Using the city of Edinburgh, UK, as our empirical setting, we examine the learning process of 34 SCEs. Our findings offer three core contributions. First, we show that collaborative learning is a key driver of innovation in the smart city domain. SCEs significantly benefit from collaborative efforts rather than competitive strategies alone. Second, we show that these collaborations develop in temporary ecosystems that contribute to enhancing the innovative capacities of SCEs. Building on these findings, we expand entrepreneurial learning theory, highlighting the critical yet overlooked role of temporary ecosystems and intermediaries in stimulating collaboration and knowledge exchange among SCEs. Third, we provide practical recommendations for policymakers, emphasizing the importance of supporting the development of strategic learning capacities and diverse learning modalities for SCEs.