Cites across the world are facing a range of multi-faceted urban challenges – wicked problems – such as increasing polarization and social exclusion, requirements to build environmentally friendly housing and infrastructure, involve and manage a wide span of stakeholder interests (i.e. businesses and citizens), while managing limited resources prudently. At the same time, many cities are understood as motors of national economic development, cultural exchange and knowledge generation. Thus, cites are at the same time seen as the solution to their own emerging challenges. This in turn puts a larger focus on local government within cities as important agents of change, which can be seen not at least by the fast growing interest for urban issues among multinational companies and the increasing number of national and international agencies steering their agenda and support towards urban issues.
“Innovation” and “collaboration” are two major process responses to complex urban challenges that are currently being suggested by local government in many cities, as well as by private sector stakeholders and national agencies. In general, these new ideas of network governance put an increased pressure on local governments to be more holistic, be able to collaborate with many different stakeholders (and institutional logics), be more flexible, act fast, and show more visible leadership. However, due to organizational limitations, legal structures and lack or human and financial resources most local government are truly challenged by this new role.
In response to the discourse mentioned above the two largest cites in Sweden, Stockholm and Gothenburg, are currently developing comprehensive innovation strategies as a way to strategically manage the growing demand for innovative urban solutions. The scope of the innovation strategy in Gothenburg, also being the case analysed in this paper, is to develop a joint framework for innovation for the whole range of municipal responsibilities of the City of Gothenburg (i.e. the local government), including everything from social policy, urban planning and strategies for growth and development. The prevailing idea is that collaboration within the local government as such, as well as in relation to external stakeholders within industry, academia and the civil society is a key enabler.
Cross-sectorial collaboration and comprehensive innovation strategies might be a reasonable policy response for urban challenges and wicked problems. However, since the difficulty of such transformation process is rarely to introduce new ideas but rather to change the prevailing procedures and established logics, we claim that in order to fully understand the challenges and possibilities of realizing a compressive innovation strategy it is crucial to understand and compare the similarities and differences between the operating logics of the different sectors within the local governmental organization. In this paper we therefore aim to describe and analyse the main factors that facilitate and hinder different sectors within local government to deal with innovation in general and to collaborate internally and externally with different stakeholders in particular. Hereby we want to contribute to a discussion on wickedness vigorously in progress within urban development (Bekkers et al, 2011: Ansell and Torfing, 2014).
