Nursery City Innovation: A CELL Framework

• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Author: Di Fan,Yiyi Su,Xinli Huang
• Date: 01 July 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13490

764 Public Administration Review • July | A ugus t 202 2

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 82, Iss. 4, pp. 764–770. © 2022 by

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13490.

Xinli Huang is an Assistant Professor in

the Institute for International Business,

Vienna University of Economics and

Business (WU Vienna), Vienna, Austria.

Her research interests include creative

economies, regional studies, and

international business strategies. Her recent

studies are published in

Regional Studies

,

Journal of World Business

,

Management

and Organization Review

,

International

Business Review

, and

International Journal

of Human Resource Management

, etc.

Email: millie.huang@wu.ac.at

Yiyi Su is an Associate Professor of

Management in the School of Economics

and Management at Tongji University,

Shanghai, China. Her researches are based

on innovation and entrepreneurship,

corporate governance, and Chinese

Management. Her recent studies are

published in

Entrepreneurship Theory

and Practice

,

Academy of Management

Discoveries

,

Management International

Review

,

Entrepreneurship & Regional

Development

,

Management and

Organization Review

,

Long Range Planning

,

Asia Pacific Journal of Management

, among

others.

Email: suyiyi@tongji.edu.cn

Di Fan is a Professor of Management

in the School of Business, Law, and

Entrepreneurship at Swinburne University

of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

His current research interest includes

regional studies and international

business strategies. His publications

appear in journals, such as

Organization

Studies

,

Journal of Management Studies

,

Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice,

Regional Studies,

Journal of World Business

,

Long Range Planning

,

Technovation

, among

others.

Email: dfan@swin.edu.au

Viewpoint Article Nursery City Innovation: A CELL Framework

Abstract: How can innovative cities be cultivated and fertilized? Embracing and reframing insights from

multidisciplinary academic discourse, we conceptualize three paired tensional dimensions, namely, the human-society,

the market-government and the global–local tensions, to form a six-I city innovation framework. Also termed a

CELL framework, the six I-related key elements are: human intelligence, societal incentives, government involvement,

market inclination, global integration, and local interconnection. Taking a holistic view, the set of collective and

interdependent institutional elements can serve to analyze the development of city innovation. The key assertion of

the study is that a city’s innovative ecosystem can be built up, and, more importantly, via configuring key institutional

arrangements.

Evidence for Practice

• Innovative cities are underpinned by their institutional arrangements, which can be worked, managed, and

built by public administrators.

• In nurturing innovative cities, public administrators need to reconcile three pairs of tensions: the societal-

human, market-government, and global–local tensions.

• There is no best practice in forming innovative cities; instead, cities can build up innovative ecosystems

through multiple paths.

• To upgrade dynamic capabilities for city innovation outcomes, public administrators are required to identify

the unique and most suitable path for each city through configuring institutional arrangements.

Local economic outcomes increasingly depend on

local idea generation.

Davis and Dingel2019, 153

The past two decades have witnessed

growing attention to transforming a

city’s innovation capacity (Davis and

Dingel2019; Frederickson, Johnson, and

Wood2004;Simmie2001; van Winden and

Carvalho2019). There have been some eye-catching

public management efforts initiated by urban

planners and administrators, such as embedding

cities in the knowledge economy (van Den Berg

etal.2018), engaging in the “smart cities” initiatives

(i.e., the digital transformation of city functions)

(Buck and While2017), and promoting the urban

creative economy (i.e., using social actors’ creative

imaginations to increase economic value) (Huang and

Fan2021; Landry2000). The emergence of these

innovative city actions not only echoes innovation

as one of the core elements of public management

(Wu, Ma, and Yang2013), but also emphasizes the

importance of designing governing mechanisms to

nurture urban innovation (Klijn2008). Derived from

the idea of innovative milieux, we define innovative

cities as a geographic space with a set of collective

processes through which multiple social actors form

networks of synergy-producing inter-relationships

to incubate innovation activities (cf. Simmie2001).

City functions in incubating innovation have been

highlighted by the literature. Marshall(1890)

argues that cities provide an important platform

to allow learning to happen. Inspired by Marshall,

scholars have proposed three further reasons: first,

the concentration of firms in a single location

offers a pooled market for workers with industry-

specific skills; second, localized industries support

the production of non-tradeable specialized inputs;

and third, informational spillovers provide a better

production function for clustered firms than for

isolated producers (Duranton and Puga2001).

Despite its insights, the public management

literature remains largely silent on a key research

question: How can innovative cities be cultivated

and fertilized? Although several attempts to study

innovative cities have been gradually made by public

management researchers (e.g., Florida, Adler, and

Di Fan Yiyi Su

Xinli Huang

Swinburne University of Technology Tongji University

WU Vienna University of Economics & Business