Organizational Engines for Smart Territorial Networks: The Case of an Initiative for Food Waste Reduction

High technologies, and ICTs in particular, offer crucial opportunities to address many dramatic problems of today’s territorial systems. What are the possible new organizational forms and organizational eco-systems that enable a more effective exploitation of these emerging opportunities? What are the key (and possibly new) managerial challenges implied? In this paper, we explore these issues through a longitudinal case study of a smart organization (SO) aimed at preventing food waste through the re-distribution of surplus food to associations that assist socially disadvantaged people. We find that only the cross-fertilization between research streams that have remained separated so far (smart cities/regions/communities; institutional entrepreneurship; and socio-ecological/socio-technical systems) could offer a satisfying explanation for the phenomena we observed. We conclude by suggesting that the emerging SOs, enabled by ICTs, can work as organizational engines allowing positive techno-institutional innovation for the common good. Therefore, the development of effective SOs could be a very relevant issue for organization and management studies for the years to come.