Knowledge and intellectual capital in smart city

Smart city is a recent but growingly popular topic, focusing on how technology can improve the quality of life in cities. A smart city strategy leverages several types of technologies, but especially ICT, to solve some of the most important urban problems such as pollution, traffic, energy consumption, waste, while also creating opportunities for citizens. In fact, a smart city aims to improve the communication between people and the public administration and to support political participation through e-governance and e-democracy. Therefore, a smart city plan could also be seen as an urban knowledge platform, connecting citizens, businesses and public bodies, thus resulting in enhanced intellectual capital at the urban level. This paper aims to describe how a smart city strategy can create valuable intellectual capital. A literature analysis crosses the definition of both smart city and intellectual capital, outlining their overlapping contents. The key “smart” projects and initiatives included in the Genova smart city strategy (Italy) are presented as an exemplary case.