The predominant rhetoric in smart city debates puts the emphasis on collaboration. Conceptualizing, designing, implementing, validating, and evaluating solutions to urban challenges with all relevant stakeholders around the table are perceived as the optimal modus operandi in these perspectives. But how does this vision relate to current practices in cities? This paper deals with the observed trend toward more multi-stakeholder collaboration and the resulting complex value networks these stakeholders need to navigate. This is exemplified in what has been called the "platformization" of the urban space by "urban service platforms" (e.g., Uber, AirBnB) as well as in so-called "quadruple helix" approaches to urban innovation. Particularly for (local) government, finding a role in these complex networks has proven challenging. This paper explores the main challenges concerning multi-stakeholder innovation and opportunities related to this topic.

As part of the rhetoric surrounding the Smart City concept, cities are increasingly facing challenges related to data (management, governance, processing, storage, publishing etc.). The growing power acquired by the data market and the great relevance assigned to data ownership rather than to data-exploitation knowhow is affecting the development of a data culture and is slowing down the embedding of data-related expertise inside public administrations. Concurrently, policies call for more open data to foster service innovation and government transparency. What are the consequences of these phenomena when imagining the potential for policy making consequent to the growing data quantity and availability? Which strategic challenges and decisions do public authorities face in this regard? What are valuable approaches to arm public administrations in this “war on data”? The Smart Flanders program was initiated by the Flemish Government (Belgium) in 2017 to research and support cities with defining and implementing a common open data policy. As part of the program, a “maturity check” was performed, evaluating the cities on several quantitative and qualitative parameters. This exercise laid to bare some challenges in the field of open data and led to a checklist that cities can employ to begin tackling them, as well as a set of model clauses to be used in the procurement of new technologies.

Abstract. In Flanders (Belgium), there is a growing awareness among city administrations and governments to turn their cities into smart cities by transforming their policy decisions into evidence-based and data-driven policymaking. Nonetheless, many Flemish cities still face several challenges related to the integration of data-driven policy evaluation research at different stages of their policy making processes. For that reason, the ‘Smart Retail Dashboard’-project was set up, which aims to develop a dashboard for helping Flemish cities in transforming their retail policies into data-driven policies. This paper reports on the initial findings of this project. The most important finding is the varying degrees of maturity across cities regarding their smart retail policies. This is illustrated by the current state of data-driven policy making in the retail sector in Flanders. Subsequently we provide an overview of the current challenges reported by mature and less mature cities, which range from the cost and the usability of data to the analysis and interpretation of such data. We discuss how a Smart Retail Dashboard could provide answers to these challenges. This discussion helps city administrations to transform their policymaking processes into data-driven processes and dashboard developers to optimise their development processes.

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