The Wharf Street Smart Park Story: A Guide to Navigating Multi-Stakeholder Innovation in Smart Cities

The challenges of multistakeholder innovation in smart city projects can be navigated through collaboration and a clear understanding of each organisation’s values, technology, user groups, and potential policy changes. Increasing technology use in urban development projects brings numerous challenges, such as technology redundancy, varying stakeholder expectations, and the required policy changes. This paper aims to discuss the story of the development of Wharf Street smart park in Western Australia and highlights strategies for overcoming the challenges of multistakeholder innovation in smart city projects. It utilises a democratic collaboration tool to map out each organisation’s vision, values, and responsibilities at the initial stage of the project to create an open innovation ecosystem where knowledge can be shared. High collaboration levels using this tool have helped establish common goals, adaptive practices and overcome governance and technical challenges. However, the tool needs further development, as it was found to be insufficient in addressing long-term management issues, risk mapping, and user group identification for big data.