Impact of Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Discussions in Smart Cities: Comprehensive Assessment of Social Media Data

Abstract

Discussions on “smart cities” are gaining in popularity in the past two decades and has shown potential in tackling the cities’ environmental, social, and economic challenges. Smart cities are known as a system of physical infrastructure, the information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure, and the social infrastructure that exchange information that flows between its many different subsystems. The “smart cities” concept has been introduced with various dimensions, among those, the embedded ICT infrastructure in smart cities is playing a decisive role between the functions of the system. One of the important derivatives of ICT is the new communication mediums known as social network services (SNSs), which is emergent and introduces additional functionalities to “smart cities”. This paper seeks to advance the understanding of SNSs in smart cities to evaluate the effects on the innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem. This agenda has been tackled by a rigorous methodological approach in order to capture and evaluate the presence of entrepreneurially concerned discussions in a popular SNS intermediate (Twitter). Beyond the methodological contribution on handling big data in SNSs for gaining insights on innovation and entrepreneurial aspects in smart cities, the findings distinguished the influence of a certain category of content generators (professionals) that drive the biggest motives of the interactions in SNSs.