Boundary Management Strategies for Leading Digital Transformation in Smart Cities

Cities worldwide are engaging in smart city digital transformation. However, delivering sustainable improvements while pursuing high-level transformational goals is highly complex. Based on interviews with smart city leaders, we identify eight challenges to sustaining and scaling-up smart city transformation. These challenges are underpinned by a clash between traditional institutional city logic and emerging smart city logic. We describe three boundary management strategies for addressing this clash and the associated challenges, and provide a framework to help smart city leaders select appropriate boundary management strategies.1